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enYoungquist and Botkin, "Introduction: Black Romanticism: Romantic Circulations"http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/circulations/HTML/praxis.2011.youngquist.html
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<h2 align="center">Circulations: Romanticism and the Black Atlantic</h2>
<h3 align="center">"Introduction: Black Romanticism: Romantic Circulations"</h3>
<p xmlns=""><strong>Paul Youngquist &amp; Frances Botkin</strong><br/>
<strong>University of Colorado, Boulder &amp; Towson University</strong></p>
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<p class=""><strong>1</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;With notable exceptions, studies in British Romanticism remain pretty white.<a href="#1">&#160;[1]</a><a name="back1">&#160;</a> It&#8217;s not simply that most Romanticists, ourselves included, are middle class white folks working for institutions that traditionally privilege peoples and cultures of European descent. Nor is it simply that British culture, at least in its Romantic avatar, presumes whiteness as the (transparent) racial bias of production. The whiteness of Romantic studies is a symptom of amnesia. It bespeaks a massive act of forgetting on the part of contemporary scholarship, an institutional disavowal of the economic conditions that help make cultural production during the Romantic Era possible: the maritime economy of the Atlantic. Anthologies tell the story of this amnesia. Few acknowledge the huge role the West Indies played as the economic engine that drove the astonishing flowering of culture we call Romanticism. While uncontroversial today, Ann Mellor and Richard Matlak&#8217;s <span xmlns="" class="titlem">British Literature 1780-1830</span> was hailed as an important revisionist compilation when it appeared in 1995. Its inside covers contain a timeline that documents the decisive events of the Romantic period, both in England and as far abroad as India. The absence of any reference to the West Indies, however, leaves the impression (if indeed an <em xmlns="">absence</em> can impress) that nothing of historical significance occurred there&#8212;no Jack Mansong, no Maroon War, no British invasion of St. Domingo, no successful slave rebellion there founding the first black republic in the history of the world.<a href="#2">&#160;[2]</a><a name="back2">&#160;</a> Such is the amnesia of Romanticism, the unremembered histories of diasporic Africans and creole cultures in the West Indies.</p>
<p class=""><strong>2</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;We want to conjure those histories, to summon the ancestor spirits who are wandering the West Indies. The process requires an incantation and ours is &#8220;Black Romanticism.&#8221; Replacing the honorific &#8220;British&#8221; with &#8220;Black&#8221; allows us to dislocate Romantic studies&#8212;literally. We move the ruling perspective of critical inquiry from the Island (England) to the islands (West Indies). This is not, however, a movement from metropole to periphery. The West Indies are not the edge of Empire. They are its engine: the economic, material, and cultural condition of British prosperity and dominion during the Romantic era. To chant &#8220;Black Romanticism&#8221; as means of conjuring this ancestry is to honor the Atlantic as its presiding genius: the Atlantic, watery vortex of myriad economic and cultural exchanges, roaring multiplicity of agencies, vast whirlpool of creative powers.</p>
<p class=""><strong>3</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Why honor the Atlantic? Why conjure its restless revenants? Partly because they haunt Britain as a territorial and national entity. They are ancestors of the nation. To the extent that Romanticism is <em xmlns="">British</em>, the nation sets the terms conceptually for its study. The consolidation of the nation as a state formation&#8212;through more blood and mayhem than many scholars want to admit&#8212;was complete by the end of the era deemed &#8220;Romantic.&#8221; It seems inevitable to approach culture by way of national origins. Consider three powerful accounts of the emergence of British Romantic culture from the consolidation of national identity. In the important book entitled <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Britons: Forging the Nation, 1701-1837</span> (1992), Linda Colley describes the difficult cultural trick of fusing England, Scotland, and Wales into a single nation, the United Kingdom. National unity became possible through three powerful, shared experiences: Protestantism, commerce, and near perpetual war (against the Dutch, the Spanish, and the French). The United Kingdom as a nation arises as a solidarity of belief, exchange, and struggle literally grounded in the insular territory of the British Isles (Ireland constituting its reviled other).</p>
<p class=""><strong>4</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;This geographic territoriality of Britain receives endless endorsement from a sustaining fantasy of community. A complementary account of the emergence of national culture occurs in Benedict Anderson&#8217;s influential <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism</span> (1994; rev. 2006). In the now familiar argument, Anderson views the nation as &#8220;an imagined political community&#8212;imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign&#8221; (6). Members of such a community may never meet each other, but they live their communion imaginatively. Three conditions produce this imagined solidarity: capitalism, print, and a language of power. Nations emerge where print advances trade in geographies administrated by such a language: the British Isles, for instance, or the Spanish new world. That makes the nation the solidarity of a linguistically configured imagination. No wonder that culture, particularly literary culture, becomes nationally configured. It&#8217;s the brainchild of a language of power that configures the nation.</p>
<p class=""><strong>5</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Finally, an important corrective occurs in the work of Srivinas Aravamudan. His <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804</span> (1999) insists that any account of the nation must consider the role of colonies in its emergence, or more specifically the decisive relationship between the imperial and colonial subject. In his view the &#8220;tropicopolitan&#8221; names the colonized subject as both an imperial fiction and a colonial fact, &#8220;object of representation <em xmlns="">and</em> agent of resistance&#8221; (4). Against Colley, Aravamudan argues for the decisive role &#8220;xenophobia, Orientalism, colonialism, and racism&#8221; (10) play in the production of national identity. The nation is not exclusively a solidarity of domination. The colonial subject can flip the script, appropriating its language of power for unimagined ends. The tropicopolitan thus invents a counter-literacy to disrupt that language, imagining a new solidarity, creating its own nation. As the creation of a linguistically configured imagination, the nation proves its own undoing, promoting in a neat Hegelian way new national possibilities in the tropical space of colonial domination.</p>
<p class=""><strong>6</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;All three of these potent accounts of the nation share assumptions that get built into the study of national cultures such as British Romanticism. They are geographically territorialized: Colley&#8217;s United Kindom, Anderson&#8217;s imagined community, and Aravamuda&#8217;s Empire are all grounded physically in territories with borders and colonial satellites. They are linguistically territorialized too: in each instance a language of power (the King&#8217;s English, printed discourse, imperial literacy) sustains national boundaries and legitimates cultural production. Finally, they are racially territorialized, albeit less obviously. Colley&#8217;s Britons may be ethnically diverse, but they are racially homogenous, congealing into the plump white body of beef-eating John Bull. Anderson&#8217;s imagined communities are only as racially diverse as a Eurpoean language of power will admit, which is to say not at all, judging from the written record of the Spanish conquest. While Aravamudan at least acknowledges the racial difference of the tropicopolitan, his emphasis on imperial literacy as the preferred means of resistance makes whiteness the cultural standard against which the colonial subject must react. Casting the other in this role of reaction devalues agencies (outside literacy, for instance) incommensurable with whiteness. The tropicopolitan occupies the queasy position of affirming whiteness to assert racial difference. The brutal history of decolonization illustrates the difficulty here. Where nation sets the terms for agency&#8212;whether of resistance or criticism&#8212;territory, literacy, and whiteness determine the means and ends of cultural production.</p>
<p class=""><strong>7</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Black Romanticism subverts those imperatives by conjuring spirits they ignore, specters of the Atlantic vortex that haunt the nation and its presumed unities. Cultural critics and radical historians of the last decade have forged new methods of calling them up and querying their wisdom. <a href="#3">&#160;[3]</a><a name="back3">&#160;</a> Paul Gilroy&#8217;s groundbreaking (in the literal sense of shattering territory as the foundation of cultural criticism) <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness</span> (1993) dislocates the <em xmlns="">space</em> of cultural criticism. Gilroy replaces the nation as stable ground of cultural production with the dynamic swirl of the Atlantic. Mobility becomes the new condition of agency. No longer rooted but routed, identities turn fluid. Cultures split, cross, and recombine. Nationality falls to hybridity as economic and cultural exchanges produce new forms of cultural production that mix high and low, literate and illiterate, white, black, and every shade of brown. Gilroy&#8217;s work recovers the cultural <em xmlns="">multiplicity</em> that unitary notions of nation, language, and race forget. It remembers too the <em xmlns="">terror</em> built into the nation as imagined community. The displaced blacks of the Black Atlantic lived the full horrifying force of cultural investments in commerce, print, and language. The Enlightenment looks different from the perspective of the living death sentence of slavery. As Gilroy insists (to the great promise of studies in Romanticism), slaves and other displaced people respond by creating counter-cultures that disrupt and transform the nation and its unities. The true cultural vanguard of the Romantic era belongs not to bourgeois word-worthies speaking as Man to men but to those displaced people forging new ways of life under
circumstances of enlightened barbarity from blood, sweat, and vision.</p>
<p class=""><strong>8</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Black Romanticism summons the spirits of those visionaries. In this it follows the lead of cultural historians who navigate the complex network of exchanges circulating people, ideas, practices, and things throughout the Atlantic. In <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Cities of the Dead</span> (1996), Joseph Roach traces the circulation of cultural exchanges throughout the &#8220;circum-Atlantic&#8221; world. Roach&#8217;s emphasis on the <em xmlns="">circle</em> in circulations is key here. There is little inherently progressive about current scholarly preoccupation with <em xmlns="">trans</em>-national (or <em xmlns="">trans-</em>Atlantic) literature. Nation grounds a linear exchange, and the stunning lesson learned is that American readers read British books. Roach&#8217;s emphasis on the circulation of surrogated cultural practices puts the stress on <em xmlns="">transformation</em>. Cultures hybridize as they move. The Atlantic transforms identities and practices as it circulates them.</p>
<p class=""><strong>9</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;The radical prophets of this position are Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. Their monumental history of Atlantic radicalism, <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Many Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic</span> (2001), politicizes what could too easily be taken for a purely cultural phenomenon: the production of new identities, hopes, visions, and communities through myriad economic and cultural exchanges throughout the Atlantic. They start at the bottom of that economy, with the displaced commoners&#8212;from Africa, Ireland, England, France, Scandinavia, the Americas, India, the Far East&#8212;who dredged the harbors and built the docks and worked the ships to make the Atlantic <em xmlns="">pay</em>. A &#8220;radical diaspora&#8221; of expropriated laborers&#8212;slaves and servants, peasants and plebs&#8212;a &#8220;motley crew&#8221; came bodily together to drive that economy. They traded words and songs, ideas and dreams as they worked. Their labor forged new cultures and communities. Their common politics was a politics of the commons, for they were driven from their common property to work alien worlds. This displaced, circulating proletariat was culturally mixed and racially heterogeneous. In Linebaugh and Rediker&#8217;s words, &#8220;It was <em xmlns="">multitudinous, numerous</em>, and <em xmlns="">growing</em>. [. . .] It was <em xmlns="">cooperative</em> and <em xmlns="">laboring</em>. [. . .] It was <em xmlns="">motley</em>, both dressed in rags and multi-ethnic in appearance. [. . .] Finally, the proletariat was <em xmlns="">self-active, creative;</em> it was&#8212;and is&#8212;alive; it is onamove&#8221; (332-33). Atlantic circulations of people, ideas, and things create new possibilities for collective living irreducible to the prim unities of territory and language. This motley crew of slaves, servants, and
sailors multiply cultures and imagine communities beyond the territorial limits of the nation.</p>
<p class=""><strong>10</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Black Romanticism summons and celebrates their example. It deterritorializes British national identity and the culture of the Romantic era, reimagining them as the <em xmlns="">effect</em> of myriad economic and cultural exchanges circulating throughout the Atlantic. Economic workers are cultural workers too. Where there is economic production there is cultural production. Where there are economic exchanges there are cultural exchanges too. Beneath the honorific of the Briton seethes a prolific cultural multiplicity irreducible to the imperatives of territory, trade, and languages. Black Romanticism remembers this forgotten ancestry of British culture, recovering the vital role Africans and other diasporic commoners play in the cultural production called Romanticism. Black Romanticism conjures these ancestors by practicing counter-literacy, reading the works of nation, empire, and colony against themselves to liberate the common cultures they occlude. Black Romanticism does not speak truth to power, but channels truths that power devalues, multiple truths that lived and died with economic and cultural workers throughout the West Indies and the larger Atlantic world.</p>
<p class=""><strong>11</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;A word about that word, &#8220;black.&#8221; It acquires a threefold valence in our usage. First, there is the obvious racial trace: black as in African, black as in slave. But read warily. The &#8220;black&#8221; in Black Romanticism is not a new and darker purity to counter British whiteness. On the contrary, it bespeaks the multiple and mixed identities that arise through the circulation of people, ideas, and things throughout the Atlantic. This, then, is the second valence of our usage: black as mixed, hybrid, creolized cultural production. We want a Romanticism that is black in the same sense as Gilroy&#8217;s Atlantic: &#8220;The fractal patterns of cultural and political exchange and transformation that we try and specify [. . .] indicate how both ethnicities and political cultures have been made anew in ways that are significant not simply for the peoples of the Caribbean but for Europe, for Africa&#8221; (15)&#8212;and for Britain too. &#8220;Black&#8221; marks those transformations. Then there is the darkest valence of all, black as &#8220;occult&#8221;&#8212;black magic, black market, the black arts. Black Romanticism acquires insurgence here. Counterforce to whiteness, black in our usage summons mute specters that haunt British Romanticism: the slaves driving it, the terror sustaining it, the common cultures challenging and transforming its superiority. Black Romanticism sets those spirits free to feed upon pure dreams of mastery. It gives them voice and communicates their vitality. In this it follows the example of Joan Dyan, whose imposing <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Haiti, History, and the Gods</span> (1996) portends a new kind of criticism that takes seriously the cultural lives of the unlettered to reveal their indelible influence on and transformation of European culture. Black Romanticism invokes those transformations to advance
them. We conjure the ancestors. We practice black arts. How black is Romanticism? As black as we can make it.</p>
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<p class=""><strong>12</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;When Jean-Jacque Dessalines tore the white band from the French <span class="foreign"><em>tricolour</em></span> in 1803, he issued a decree that would resonate in Haiti&#8217;s 1805 inaugural constitution. This constitution pronounced all Haitians &#8220;black,&#8221; including Polish and German mercenaries who remained on the island. Arguably the first ideological deployment of the term &#8220;black,&#8221; this revolutionary tactic ultimately foundered in practice when Dessalines applied the methods of the French to the whites of the island and ordered the massacre of those who threatened the new nation. In so doing he, as Lindsey Twa has suggested, &#8220;sealed for Haiti a lasting reputation as a nightmare republic in the eyes of the greater white world&#8221; (2). However, Dessalines&#8217; incongruous legacy as both hero and villain attests to the sheer vitality and uneasy complexity of his proclamation of a &#8220;Black Haiti.&#8221; He was, in retrospect, both the perpetrator and the victim of the violence that can and did accompany the exchange and transformation of new world culture. Out of this carnage, new cultural, spiritual and socio-economic identities emerged: &#8220;great spirits on earth&#8221; sojourned to create a &#8220;brave new world&#8221; with &#8220;such people in it.&#8221; <a href="#4">&#160;[4]</a><a name="back4">&#160;</a></p>
<p class=""><strong>13</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Such people include in addition to Dessalines, Juan Manzano, Jack Mansong, Mary Prince, and John Gabriel Stedman: an emperor, a poet, a bandit, a slave, and a soldier. Although these five figures emerged from different geopolitical environments in the Caribbean, they share a complex historical and literary trajectory: a circum-Atlantic labyrinth of shifting, intersecting, and metamorphosing narratives. Four of them were, but did not remain, enslaved, and the fifth simultaneously condoned and condemned the institution. Despite occupying literal and figurative margins, each of these persons claimed the spotlight in metropole, hinterland, and colony. Their stories&#8212;and variations of their stories&#8212;traveled through and around the Black Atlantic during the Romantic era and after.</p>
<p class=""><strong>14</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Writings from within as well as about the Caribbean offer insight into the construction of European texts. The African-Briton binary employed by traditionally white Romanticism does not accommodate the history and reality of the West Indies. The inclusion of voices and stories from Jamaica, Suriname, Haiti, Bermuda, and Cuba, for example, underscore the African legacies so often marginalized in European stories; in so doing it irrevocably alters the narratives of the metropole. It is perhaps little surprise that narratives emerging from the creolized culture of the New World would change the way both African &#8212; and European &#8212; descended people understand and represent themselves and their others (to themselves and their others). Kathleen M. Balutansky and Marie Agnes Sourieau have identified in these creole cultures &#8220;a syncretic process of transverse dynamics that endlessly reworks and transforms the cultural patterns of varied social and historical experiences and identities&#8221; (3). In other words, narratives emerging from the Caribbean are both pre-mediated and pre-meditated.</p>
<p class=""><strong>15</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Although recent scholarship has called attention to the many (and legitimate) problems of historical transmission in the Black Atlantic world&#8212;especially to narrative and mnemonic gaps&#8212;this collection of essays considers how the circulation of radically different adaptations of the &#8220;same&#8221; stories provides new ways to understand the colonial Caribbean. <a href="#5">&#160;[5]</a><a name="back5">&#160;</a> We pay particular attention to the transatlantic exchange and transformation of stories about slavery, colonialism and their aftermaths in efforts to piece together the fragments of an elusive and violent past.</p>
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<p class=""><strong>16</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Stories about Jean-Jacque Dessalines, Jack Mansong, Juan Manzano, John Gabriel Stedman, and Mary Prince have over the past two centuries become part of a constellation of stories about slavery and colonialism, following a circuitous route that began in Africa and traveled from Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba, Suriname, Bermuda, and Antigua to corresponding points in England, America, and the continent. Each narrative has endured transformations that render the &#8220;original&#8221; story less significant than the ways the stories connected with them have changed, or been changed. Each of these figures has acquired multiple and contradictory reputations in part due to changing audiences and media.</p>
<p class=""><strong>17</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Jean-Jacques Dessalines, for example, has been represented as both despot and deity. Formerly enslaved, Dessalines rose to power with violence and bloodshed, christened himself Emperor of Haiti, and triumphed over an oppressive European rule. Although Dessalines meant for the newly-independent Haiti to function without slavery, he eventually resorted to related despotic measures in what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has termed <span class="foreign"><em>caporalism agraire</em></span>, or agrarian militarism. When he ordered the massacre of the remaining French colonists in Haiti after a reign of terror echoing that of revolutionary France, he incited the wrath of his own soldiers who ambushed and executed him. Though Dessalines has sustained a reputation as an autocratic despot, he has also been deemed a heroic founding father of Haiti. In other words, he was both oppressed and oppressor&#8212;slave and emperor&#8212;in a constantly shifting social order.</p>
<p class=""><strong>18</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Slave rebel &#8220;Three-Fingered Jack&#8221; Mansong, has been known in England and the Caribbean as both the &#8220;Robin Hood of the Tropical Forest&#8221; and the &#8220;Terror of Jamaica.&#8221; Narratives about his life emerged in England, the United States, and Jamaica, offering different interpretations to varying audiences over the course of two centuries. To this day, he remains a shadowy and ambiguous hero-villain in Jamaica. As both an emblem of freedom and a murderous thug with a history inextricably linked to the likewise elusive (and entirely oral) Maroon history, he embodies the contradictions that characterize life under and on the margins of plantation life.</p>
<p class=""><strong>19</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Stories by and about the Afro-Cuban Juan Manzano provide a rich but contradictory narrative landscape. Manzano was, like Dessalines and Jack Mansong, once enslaved, but he achieved his freedom by pen rather than machete. After his escape from slavery, he worked for planter Domingo Del Monte who allegedly helped him raise funds to buy his own freedom. Del Monte gave Manzano&#8217;s poems and autobiography to his friend, Robert Madden, who translated Manzano&#8217;s work from Spanish, added several appendices, and prefaced the resulting volume with his own poems before sending them out in print. In addition, Manzano&#8212;a renowned storyteller&#8212;circulated his own stories orally in Cuba and Jamaica. These overlapping and stories and genres create a space to explore different geopolitical systems and approaches to slavery and abolition.</p>
<p class=""><strong>20</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;John Gabriel Stedman&#8217;s <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Slaves of Suriname</span> (1796) sits precariously within an archive that includes a web of re-printings, editorial mediations, and images&#8212;most notably William Blake&#8217;s engraved illustrations. The Dutch-Scots Stedman wrote about his life in Suriname and his relationship with its inhabitants, particularly his alliance with his concubine Joanna and their son, Johnny. Like Manzano&#8217;s narrative, Stedman&#8217;s reaches a much wider audience than he anticipated, however different from him in taste or agenda. Despite the disparities among the texts, reading between and across the narratives offers a prismatic look at life in eighteenth-century Suriname. Stedman&#8217;s fascination with Maroons, for example, provides a valuable resource to understand a history that has few written texts in its repertoire. Although Stedman sustained a reputation as an authority on Suriname, he b ecame, arguably, an exotic object of consumption to be enjoyed by audiences in Europe and the Americas.</p>
<p class=""><strong>21</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself</span>, emerged in 1831, the first account of a Black woman to be published in England. Born into slavery in Bermuda, moved to Antigua, and then taken to London by her master, John Wood, Prince found employment with Thomas Pringle, the secretary to the Anti-Slavery society and the eventual editor of her (transcribed) narrative soon after landing upon English soil. Prince&#8217;s highly mediated account has invited critical conversations about the authenticity of her text since it first appeared, including two libel suits that attest to its polemical nature. Prince&#8217;s multi-layered narrative captures the trauma and dispossession that characterizes her transatlantic experience, and its history&#8212;like hers&#8212;offers a unique opportunity to examine the exigencies of life under and after slavery.</p>
<p class=""><strong>22</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;In the first essay of this volume, "Jean-Jacques Dessalines: Demon, Demigod, and Everything in Between" Lindsey Twa traces representations of Dessalines in literary and visual texts from Haiti, the United States, and Europe to examine how these representations shape his fascinating legacy. Twa&#8217;s essay insightfully proposes that Dessalines&#8217; legacy&#8212;like his physical body&#8212;was both torn asunder and restored, &#8220;rendering his complex legacy piecemeal.&#8221; Twa explores his journey from abject slave to revolutionary hero and locates his ultimate status as <span class="foreign"><em>Iwa</em></span> (spirit) in Vodou practice as a cultural space that &#8220;recognizes and celebrates the contradictory nature of this mercurial figure&#8221; (3). She notes that Kreyol (French Creole) folk songs and ritualistic practice focus on the liberty he brings, &#8220;through a body that is both powerful and dismembered, heroic and corrupt, living and dead&#8221; (16).</p>
<p class=""><strong>23</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;In our second essay, "Rewriting the History of Black Resistance: The Haitian Revolution, Jamaican Maroons and the &#8216;History&#8217; of &#8216;Three-Fingered Jack&#8217; in English Popular Culture, 1799-1830," Lissette Szwydky examines British adaptations of the history of the notorious rebel. She argues that the popular history of Jack Mansong can be read as part of a larger colonial history that misrepresents black resistance in the Caribbean and the Americas. Particularly concerned with erasure of Maroon history from these adaptations, she shows how they demonstrate that &#8220;an instance of collective rebellion could be sensationalized to the point of being rendered politically insignificant.&#8221; By stripping Jack of his gang of followers and by changing the identity of his captor from a Maroon to a slave, she suggests, the British stage and print versions deny the actual history of black resistance and independence in Jamaica.</p>
<p class=""><strong>24</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;In our third essay, "Translating a Slave&#8217;s Life: Richard Robert Madden and the Post-Abolition Trafficking of Juan Manzano&#8217;s <em xmlns="">Poems by a Slave in the Island of Cuba</em>," Joselyn Almeida examines the translations of Juan Manzano&#8217;s <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Poems</span>, a manuscript that followed a labyrinthine route before its eventual publication. Almeida suggests that the translation provided British abolitionists with the cultural capital necessary to &#8220;ensure a future beyond 1840 given the realignment of geopolitical and economic power in the Atlantic&#8221; (11). Madden&#8217;s translation functions, she argues, &#8220;as a sign of appropriated cultural labor, and performs an ideological accommodation of slavery within the free market/free labor system&#8221; (3).</p>
<p class=""><strong>25</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;In the fourth essay, "Going Viral: Stedman's <em xmlns="">Narrative</em>, Textual Variation, and Life in Atlantic Studies," Dustin Kennedy argues that the Stedman archive functions as a new &#8220;interpretive unit of cultural-community formation&#8221; that &#8220;re-directs attention to revolt and insurrection as divergent (and raced) social/political factors in the eighteenth-century.&#8221; Identifying Stedman as one of many authorial voices that are disseminated through the archive of the <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Narrative</span>, Kennedy reveals how the many iterations of the account create a &#8220;cross-pollination&#8221; or circulation of revolutionary ideas throughout the Caribbean, the Americas and Europe.</p>
<p class=""><strong>26</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Our final essay, Michele Speitz&#8217;s "Blood Sugar and Salt Licks: Corroding Bodies and Preserving Nations in <em xmlns="">The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself</em>," uses the brutal work of the salt flats to link the British colonial project with the revolutionary history of the United States. Exploring the material and metaphoric significance of Prince&#8217;s narrative, she argues that the &#8220;realities of salt production under slavery corrode the liberatory claims of both nations.&#8221; In so doing, her essay extends critical conversations about slave narratives to include the largely overlooked relevance of salt raking to the economies and politics of the Black Atlantic.</p>
<p class=""><strong>27</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Taken together, these five essays advance a criticism attuned to the multiplicity that sleeps and seethes beneath &#8220;Romanticism.&#8221; If the vortex of the Atlantic creates new cultures&#8212;then and now&#8212;Black Romanticism makes them visible and promotes their interminable circulations. We&#8217;re conjuring spirits here, the voluble but hitherto silenced spirits of the diasporic people whose labor drove the Atlantic economy and whose creativity infected and inflected the culture of their so-called masters. It would be easy to do so as benefactors, but we hope to avoid that presumption. Dayan defines terror as whipping with one hand while comforting with the other: &#8220;You harm, and then you alleviate the harm you have caused: the executioner also gets to be the savior; the benevolence continues the brutalization, while claiming otherwise&#8221; (206). The trick to conjuring spirits such as those of the slaves that haunt Romanticism is interrupting the legacy of terror that brutalized them.</p>
<p class=""><strong>28</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;That means resisting the tendency to situate their messages in advance: as primitive, occult, untutored, &#8220;African.&#8221; The powerful creative force of enslaved peoples in the West Indies gave rise to cultural forms through which they affirmed their lives under terms of subjection: Obeah, Myal, Voodoo, medicine, cooking, gardening, handicraft, and the like. These were not the customs of distant primitives. They arose in curious and productive contact with European cultures dislocated from their respective metropoles, dominant cultures for which the process of domination produced occasions too for change.</p>
<p class=""><strong>29</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Black Romanticism is a double listening. It respects the spirits of the subjected peoples and tries to hear their shouts and cries and whispers. The Assembly of Jamaica heard only superstition and resistance in Obeah. Sharper ears discover a politics there, an economics, the proud affirmation of dislocated lives creating forms of culture from a mix of inherited, borrowed and found materials. The second register of listening, then, involves the culture of the colonists. Constant exposure to the contagion of slavery infects it to the point of sometimes subtle, sometimes significant mutation. It&#8217;s a notorious clich&#233;, but one worth pondering: colonists go native in the West Indies&#8212;well, not <em xmlns="">native</em> but creole. They start to speak a slack patois. They begin to enjoy the local cuisine. They sleep with slaves. In a different but no less decisive way than that of the people who sustain their lives, colonial culture changes.</p>
<p class=""><strong>30</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Kamau (Edward) Brathwaite calls this process <em xmlns="">creolization</em> and argues that it and not subjection describes the interaction between European and African cultures in the Caribbean. Creolization presumes &#8220;a way of seeing the society, not in terms of white and black, master and slave in separate nuclear units, but as contributory parts of a whole&#8221; (307). It would be a mistake, then, to view the complex cultures produced in the West Indies as the product of slave societies. Rather, they arise out of a difficult process whereby different peoples &#8220;adapt themselves to a new environment and to each other&#8221;(307). Creolization in this sense is the heart and soul of Black Romanticism. We conjure spirits to hear the changes they ring on Caribbean and European cultures.</p>
<div class="citations" id="body.1_div.1_div.3_div.1">
<h4 align="center">Works Cited</h4>
<div type="listBibl">
<p class="hang">Anderson, Benedict. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism</span>. 1983 Rev ed. London: Verso, 2006. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Aramaduvan, Srivinas. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804</span>. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Balutansky, Kathleen, M. and Marie Agnes Sourieau, eds. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity</span>. [n.p.]: University Press of Florida, 1998. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Brathwaite, Edward. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820</span>. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Baucom, Ian. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Spectres of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History</span>. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Carretta, Vincent, ed. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century</span>. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1996. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Colley, Linda. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Britons: Forging the Nation, 1701-1837</span>. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Gilroy, Paul. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness</span>. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader</span>. Ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Hartman, Saidiya V. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America</span>. New York: Oxford, 1997. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Hutchings Kevin. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Romantic Ecologies and Colonial Cultures in the British Atlantic World, 1770-1850</span>. Montreal: McGill UP, 2009. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Lee, Debbie. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Slavery and the Romantic Imagination</span>. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">--- and Alan Richardson, eds. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Early Black British Writing</span>. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic</span>. Boston: Beacon, 2001. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Mellor, Anne and K. Richard Matlak, eds. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">British Literature, 1780-1830</span>. Boston: Heinle &amp; Heinle, 1996. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Morisson, Toni. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination</span>. New York: Vintage, 1993. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Newman, Lance, Joel Pace and Chris Koenig-Woodyard, eds. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Transatlantic Romanticism: An Anthology of British, American, and Canadian Literature</span>. London: Longman, 2006. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Richardson, Alan and Sonia Hofkosh, eds. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834</span>. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Roach, Joseph. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Cities of the Dead</span>. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Shakespeare, William. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Tempest</span>. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2004. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Taylor, Diana. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas</span>. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Thomas, Helen. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies</span>. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Verhoeven, W. M. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Revolutionary Histories: Transatlantic Cultural Nationalisms, 1770-1815</span>. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Williamson, Katrina, ed. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Contrary Voices: Representations of West Indian Slavery, 1657-1834</span>. Kingston: U of West Indies P, 2008. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Wood, Marcus. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography</span>. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Wu, Duncan. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Romanticism: An Anthology</span>. 3rd ed. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006. Print.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="notes">
<div class="noteHeading">
<h3>Notes</h3>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="1">[1]</a> Some of the notable exceptions include Richardson and Hofkosh, Lee, Thomas, and Wood. Even these scholars can be dogged by the spectre of what we call &#8220;abolitionism,&#8221; the tendency of Western scholarship with the best of intentions to fabricate a discourse of blackness it then discovers and advocates, an Africanized Orientalism of the sort Morrison describes. The subaltern can&#8217;t get a word in edgewise. <a href="#back1">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="2">[2]</a> Besides token selections from Equiano and Yearsly, Mellor and Matlak include Maria Edgeworth&#8217;s &#8220;The Grateful Negro&#8221; (1804). But that&#8217;s hardly a hymn to cultural crossing. The &#8220;Comprehensive Chronology&#8221; at the back of their edition, while capacious, persists in neglecting the West Indies. It doesn&#8217;t help much to excuse the oversight by referring to the benighted times of the anthology&#8217;s original publication (1996). It was reissued in paperback in 2005. That same year, the third edition of Duncan Wu&#8217;s implacably titled <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Romanticism</span> (the category having swallowed any national distinction) hardly nods toward the West Indies in its 1552 pages. One might expect an anthology entitled <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Transatlantic Romanticism</span> (2006) to feature the Caribbean. However, editors Lance Newman, Joel Pace, and Chris Koenig-Woodyard make <em xmlns="">nation</em> the condition of Atlantic crossings, building an anthology that does little more than unite the old national entities of England, America, and Canada in a transatlantic horizon of whiteness. In the world of letters, segregation prevails. Black writing from of the Romantic era has its own special neighborhoods. Visit Richardson and Lee&#8217;s <em xmlns="">Early Black British Writers</em> (and notice their nationalization of blackness), or Vincent Caretta&#8217;s <em xmlns="">Unchained Voices</em>. Williamson&#8217;s collection, on the other hand, mixes contrary voices in exciting new ways. <a href="#back2">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="3">[3]</a> Important contributions other than those we mention include Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Ian Baucom, Stuart Hall, W.M. Verhoeven, and Kevin Hutchings. <a href="#back3">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="4">[4]</a> This line is famously spoken by Miranda at the conclusion of the <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Tempest</span>. We here also evoke Keats&#8217; perhaps equally renowned quotation, &#8220;Great spirits on earth are now sojourning&#8221; (from the sonnet of that title, in "To the Same [Haydon]," <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Poetical Works of 1884</span>, which in turn invokes Wordsworth. <a href="#back4">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="5">[5]</a> In addition to the work of Joseph Roach, Diana Taylor provides a fantastic study of the relationships between the archive and the repertoire&#8212;between written and embodied histories. Saidya Hartman urges us to &#8220;brush history against the grain&#8221; as a critical element of the &#8220;struggle within and against the constraints and silences imposed by the nature of the archive&#8212;the system that governs the appearance of statements and generates social meaning&#8221; (11). <a href="#back5">BACK</a></p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/youngquist-paul">Youngquist, Paul</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/botkin-frances">Botkin, Frances</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/3561" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Race</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1667" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">slavery</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1286" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">colonialism</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/black-atlantic" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">black atlantic</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/creolization" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">creolization</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/juan-manzano-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Juan Manzano</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/jack-mansong" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jack Mansong</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/mary-prince-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mary Prince</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/john-gabriel-stedman-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Gabriel Stedman</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/maroons" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Maroons</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/jack-mansong" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jack Mansong</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/paul-gilroy-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Paul Gilroy</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/john-gabriel-stedman-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Gabriel Stedman</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jean-jacques-dessalines-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jean-Jacques Dessalines</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/linda-colley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Linda Colley</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/juan-manzano-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Juan Manzano</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/joseph-roach" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Joseph Roach</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/richard-e-matlak-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Richard E. Matlak</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/mary-prince-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mary Prince</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/antigua" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Antigua</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/cuba" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Cuba</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/bermuda" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bermuda</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/france" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">France</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/united-states" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">United States</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/suriname" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Suriname</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/haiti" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Haiti</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/jamaica" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jamaica</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/scotland" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Scotland</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/india" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">India</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/ireland" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ireland</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/wales" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Wales</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-region-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Region:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/region/british-isles" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">British Isles</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/region/caribbean" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Caribbean</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/region/west-indies" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">West Indies</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Continent:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/europe" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Europe</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/continent/americas" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Americas</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/africa" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Africa</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-naturalfeature-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NaturalFeature:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/natural-feature/indies" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Indies</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/natural-feature/british-isles" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">British Isles</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 01 May 2012 23:05:18 +0000rc-admin23002 at http://www.rc.umd.eduSpeitz, "Blood Sugar and Salt Licks: Corroding Bodies and Preserving Nations in The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself"http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/circulations/HTML/praxis.2011.speitz.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2011-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">October 2011</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/circulations/index.html">Circulations: Romanticism and the Black Atlantic</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><!--Couldn't selectively extract content, Imported Full Body :( May need to used a more carefully tuned import template.-->
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<h2 align="center">Circulations: Romanticism and the Black Atlantic</h2>
<h3 align="center">"Blood Sugar and Salt Licks: Corroding Bodies and Preserving Nations in <em xmlns="">The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself</em>" <a href="#1">&#160;[1]</a><a name="back1">&#160;</a></h3>
<p xmlns=""><strong>Michele Speitz</strong><br/>
<strong>University of Colorado, Boulder</strong></p>
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<p class=""><strong>1</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;<span xmlns="" class="titlem">The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself</span> is a particularly slippery narrative. Published in 1831, it appeared well after the 1807 Act of Parliament that had abolished the slave trade, but just two years before the Crown&#8217;s 1833 Emancipation Bill.<a href="#2">&#160;[2]</a><a name="back2">&#160;</a> The later document legally freed slaves in British colonies, and few doubt the place of Prince&#8217;s <span xmlns="" class="titlem">History</span> in the mounting storm of anti-slavery voices that swayed the popular sentiment necessary for the bill&#8217;s passage. But questions of authorship and veracity trouble this text.<a href="#3">&#160;[3]</a><a name="back3">&#160;</a> Critics recognize that Prince&#8217;s <span xmlns="" class="titlem">History</span> is a highly mediated document, involving the Quaker Susanna Strickland Moodie, who was Prince&#8217;s amanuensis, and the abolitionist Thomas Pringle, whose notably anxious prefatory remarks disavow any biased editorial work.<a href="#4">&#160;[4]</a><a name="back4">&#160;</a> Debates over the narrative&#8217;s multigeneric qualities add to these questions of authenticity. Indeed, the work contains many tropes common to early-nineteenth-century slave narratives: an almost epic catalogue of physical, sexual, and mental violations; scenes of forced, degrading, and painful familial separation; accounts of &#8220;going from one butcher to another&#8221; when being sold and passed on to new slave owners; and apostrophic appeals given up to a Christian deity that both establish the speaker
as righteous and call attention to the contrastingly &#8220;ungodly&#8221; acts perpetrated by masters, overseers, and plantocrats alike (71-2).<a href="#5">&#160;[5]</a><a name="back5">&#160;</a> However, this essay seeks to move beyond regarding this text as a record of the horrific realties of the institution of slavery in some abstract sense. Instead, it turns to the material and metaphoric significance of salt in Prince&#8217;s autobiography in order to recover a lost history of the Caribbean slave economy and to recognize types of rhetorical and artistic nuance overlooked in critical discussions about slave narratives.</p>
<p class=""><strong>2</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;A focus on salt allows us to see in more complicated ways how the narrative of Mary Prince figures in the popular imagination, especially when considering the ways in which histories of Caribbean slave economies have been and continue to be influenced by academic scholarship on the Caribbean, the Americas, and the British Empire. Prince&#8217;s account of slavery in the Bermudan salt flats bespeaks a commercial diversity not often acknowledged in scholarly accounts of slave economies. Current critical dialogues seem to have let our Romantic predecessors set the boundaries of our considerations of the Caribbean and, like Coleridge, Shelley, or William Fox, we tend to speak widely about sugar and tobacco, two generally expendable or superfluous goods, and grant little attention to more essential consumables harvested by enslaved laborers. This concentration on the sweet or smoky has occluded the Caribbean salt industry&#8217;s material significance and covered over this particular slave commodity. Further, buttressing the vast amount of scholarship on the historical significance of luxury consumables which could easily impede international or regional revenue streams if boycotted, this paper brings to light the unacknowledged history of Caribbean salt raking relative to not only British colonial economies and politics, but also to the revolutionary history of the United States, in which it plays a pivotal role.</p>
<p class=""><strong>3</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Prince&#8217;s narrative attests to the importance of salt, a central product of slave labor in the British-held West Indies. Although its overall value is largely ignored in literary scholarship, harvesting salt proved harmful enough to inspire Prince&#8217;s rendition of a horrific <em xmlns="">contortion of being</em>. Her repeated detrimental exposure to salt transforms Prince&#8217;s body, consciousness, and ultimately, of course, her narrative &#8212; making it tantamount to a material history and psychological case study of a forced merger of landscape, labor, body, and mind. Prince&#8217;s text records how lethal amounts of salt seep through the skin, forging a visceral, literal, and grotesque union between salt, the commodified substance, and the slave, the commodified worker.</p>
<p class=""><strong>4</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;William Fox&#8217;s "An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Utility of Refraining from the Use of West India Sugar and Rum" exemplifies the general scope and reach of British abolitionist rhetoric, which was often linked only to the sugar trade. He describes the West Indies as &#8220;a world of groans, tears and blood, where the body is externalized, turned into the environment in which it is tortured&#8221; (131). For transatlantic slavery economies, it is precisely the salt marshes of the West Indies where such a transformation was possible; where the body is beyond a doubt &#8220;externalized&#8221; in the manner Fox mentions above as it blends and metamorphosizes into a state of dreadful hypersalinity, increasingly absorbing and resembling the salt-drenched landscape within which it labors. Critic Timothy Morton cites Fox&#8217;s speech in his wonderful collection <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Radical Food</span>, but in keeping with contemporary discourse on slavery and British colonial commodities he applies the statement to sugar only, though it can also offer a point of origin for the complex array of Caribbean slave commodities, both excessive and essential (6-7, 13).</p>
<p class=""><strong>5</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;In his influential exploration of what he identifies as the Blood Sugar topos, Morton explains how British subjects wrote, read, and parodied an association between the sugar in their tea and the blood of the slaves forced to harvest it, linking notions of guilt and shame to the consumption of sugar obtained from the West Indies. Building upon the ways that Morton catalogues the various cash crops produced by British holdings in the Caribbean, I would add to this list the interim period when Turks Island functioned as a source of salt, not a luxury good but a survival commodity. By providing a necessary substance and sacrificing their lives in the salt ponds, these enslaved subjects preserved the colonies by preserving the colonists&#8217; food.</p>
<p class=""><strong>6</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Tellingly, salt does not meet the criterion of superfluousness that foments a sentiment of shameful consumption back in England and drives Romantic authors to decry slavery in droves. Morton&#8217;s project reminds us of the type of self-righteous remarks Coleridge integrates into his lectures against slavery, which are as follows:</p>
<div class="blockquote">Surely if the inspired Philanthropist of Galilee were to revisit earth and be among the feasters as at Cana he would not change Water into Wine but haply convert the produce into the things producing, the occasioned into the things occasioning! Then with our fleshly eye should we behold what even now truth-painting Imagination should exhibit to us &#8211; instead of sweetmeats Tears and Blood, and Anguish &#8211; and instead of Music groaning and the loud Peals of the Lash. (13-4)</div>
Coleridge&#8217;s critique depends upon not just Christian notions of transubstantiation. It also turns upon the ironic fluctuations coursing between his depiction of the horrifying affect generated by the suggestion of the slave body &#8220;groaning&#8221; under the &#8220;loud Peals of the Lash&#8221; and the celebratory sensations registered by the &#8220;feasters&#8221; of opulent and inessential &#8220;sweetmeats.&#8221; But the slave-based economy was more diverse than this, as the salt trade demonstrates. The Blood Sugar discourse never broadly acknowledges colonial profiteering reaped by the salt trade and includes only the most easily expendable of slave commodities; however, keeping this in mind, it is also important to consider how it would be difficult, if not unjust on various levels, to shame someone for consuming an item essential to life. In addition, the boycott of any luxury good engendered great economic consequences within the whole of the slave trade, bringing in larger tax revenues per item than common goods like salt.
<p class=""><strong>7</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Further complicating the history of this discourse, Prince repeatedly refers to the &#8220;sweetness&#8221; of freedom in her text, but the fact that she works in the salt flats instead of sugarcane fields problematizes the textual figuration of the &#8220;image of sugar-as-revolution, of rebellion-as-sweet, which holds these two meanings so delicately in (dis)solution&#8221; (Morton 102).<a href="#6">&#160;[6]</a><a name="back6">&#160;</a> Pertaining to the sugar trade, the association between sweetness and freedom hybridizes the qualities of the sugar trade and of sugar the commodity: sugar signifies the pain and harm slavery incurs, while standing as a celebrated consumable with a taste so palatable that it can represent slavery&#8217;s opposite, freedom. In contrast, sweetness for Prince is only ever the antithesis of salt; salt is not her preservation. Her slave status denies her even the dietary benefits salt yields for those classed high enough to consume salt-preserved meat. For her corn-fed and meat-deprived existence, salt only and exclusively helps others such as the American revolutionaries, whose support of economic and political independence figures conversely to her imprisonment. As she concludes her history, Prince repeats one of her main claims: &#8220;All slaves want to be free&#8212;to be free is very sweet&#8221; (85, 93). Although Prince was born in Brackish Pond, Bermuda, a site named after the intersection between salt water and fresh water, her text displays not one kind word devoted to the world of the savory; there is no such salient, silver-lined nostalgia or ironic wordplay attributed to salt. She goes on record as contrasting, insisting, repeating that &#8220;to be free is very sweet.&#8221; Unlike the Blood Sugar topos, which allowed literary giants to dabble in its ironic aesthetic, Prince&#8217;s daily encounters and direct material relationship with the
savory commodity that is salt drive the ironic inflections embedded in her allusions to human liberty rendered &#8220;sweet.&#8221;</p>
<p class=""><strong>8</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Salt is the linguistic linchpin of Prince&#8217;s narrative just as it was the all-consuming force behind her existence on Turks Island. Thus, salt offers a poetic as well as material significance to Caribbean history. According to figures compiled by the National Museum on Turks Island, salt production began in the Bermudas by default. At the close of the seventeenth century, the greater expanses of the North American mainland dwarfed Bermuda&#8217;s tobacco output, so Bermuda needed &#8220;another export, and they found it in salt production on Grand Turk Island&#8221; (3).<a href="#7">&#160;[7]</a><a name="back7">&#160;</a> Beginning in 1660, and continuing for 300 years, the salt trade was the foundation of the island&#8217;s economy (2). By the time of the American Revolution, the colonies on the North American mainland had greatly increased the demand for salt. At this point maritime law decreed that any &#8220;American vessel carrying salt was automatically subject to seizure,&#8221; but Bermuda &#8220;was at the same time dependent on the mainland for survival and so continued an illegal trade with the colonies&#8221; (10). During the period when European North America stretched from the Atlantic coast to the Appalachians, mainland salt sources were scarce. Merchants had to turn to Europe and the West Indies for salt, and Grand Turk and Salt Cay in fact provided roughly one-sixth of the salt British North Americans consumed before the American Revolution (15). Museum sources trumpet the point that &#8220;salt imports [were] vital to the success of the American Revolution and [that] the United States was dependent upon the salt imports . . . until almost the end of the nineteenth century&#8221; (16).</p>
<p class=""><strong>9</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Unlike most historical surveys produced today that focus almost exclusively on the Bermudan sugar trade, various historical texts from the colonial period evidence the Bermudan salt works, and the impact of its respective slave economy. A chronicle entitled "Salt" from John Holroyd, the Earl of Sheffield&#8217;s 1783 <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Observations on the Commerce of the American States with Europe and the West Indies</span>, confirms the Turks and Caicos National Museum&#8217;s claims in the following remarks:</p>
<div class="blockquote">A great part of the salt consumed in the American States especially for butter and pork, was imported from the salt islands in the West Indies; but the planters had no concern with it; it was no production of their labor, but of the heat of the sun, was collected by the Bermudans, and sold at a low price to the ships from the continent. (25)</div>
The Earl of Sheffield not only documents the large amount of salt North American colonists demanded, but further displays the commodity as a source of easy profit for entrepreneurial British colonials. This passage also reveals the labor stratification involved in salt production, which relied on &#8220;Bermudan&#8221; labor, or, in other words, slave labor that would in time evolve into wage-slave labor. Adding greater detail, in the 1796 publication, <span xmlns="" class="titlem">An Historical, Geographical, Commercial, and Philosophical View of the United States of America, and of the European Settlements in America and the West-Indies</span>, William Winterbotham records Bermudan migratory labor practices, marking a seasonal influx of three to four hundred men who would leave Bermuda proper to rake salt on Turks Island. Winterbotham relates how the salt garnered from such projects was later &#8220;carried to America for provisions&#8221; (290). Additional evidence of an early North American dependence upon West Indian salt exists in the vast annals of George Washington&#8217;s letters. In various epistles Washington discusses Bermudan imports essential to pre- and post-revolutionary America, and in a letter drafted in 1779 he directly refers to the exchange of American-made flour for salt procured from the Bermudan Isles (436).
<p class=""><strong>10</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;These historical documents evidence the foundational trade relationship that bound the North American colonists to West Indian salt colonies; however, the scant amount of extant scholarship that touches upon this economic relationship presents almost no information covering the excruciating day-to-day realities involved in the processes of salt production. Even though the Turks and Caicos Islands&#8217; Museum offers a nod to the salt industry and its legacy as a slave economy, it nevertheless replicates the popular focus on the sugar trade, providing just one brief paragraph detailing salt raking as &#8220;brutal labor,&#8221; and a few asides addressing how no colonists or planters would trouble themselves with the harsh business of harvesting salt from the ponds of Turks Island or Salt Cay. The Museum&#8217;s literature does, however, explain how standing in &#8220;brine all day or walking barefoot over chunks of salt crystal made the work drudgery. Cuts failed to heal and boils developed on skin constantly exposed to brine. The bright sun reflecting off salt water, white sand, and salt crystals contributed to the onset of blindness&#8221; (12). More nuanced and complete renderings of such labor-induced deformations do not exist in the archival depositories or in the holdings of the Turks and Caicos National Museum, but they frequently emerge in Prince&#8217;s narrative.</p>
<p class=""><strong>11</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Prince allows us to bridge a gap in our understanding of the history of salt production even though, as Moira Ferguson rightly notes, the Bermudan salt industry was in decline by the time Prince became involved in it (8). Prince&#8217;s experience in the salt ponds provides her the means to display the material horrors of this specific mode of slave labor, and also enables her to create a personal metaphor or trope for the moral corruption that slavery was spreading well beyond the salt works of Turks Island. On a material level, American revolutionaries either had no access to or had to turn their backs on British imports, making them dependent upon the salt harvested in the brackish Bermuda. This made salt mining on Turks Island as lucrative as it was inhumane, and in various passages Prince strives to unveil the atrocities salt imposes on the bodies forced to rake it. Ultimately, Prince molds her many references to the salt industry of Turks Island into a compelling trope, grafting her figurations of a body and mind transformed by labor onto narratives of a British body politic and its ideological claims that purport to be working for freedom. Further, Prince&#8217;s testimony acknowledges how even though the enslaved salt rakers had to dedicate the majority of any twenty-four hour day to laboring in the salt flats, these were not the only moments in which slaves on Turks Island were dosed with deadly amounts of salt.</p>
<p class=""><strong>12</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Prince describes a typical day of salt raking as one beginning at 4 a.m. with labor continuing until dark, interrupted solely by rushed breaks&#8212;the only point at which she could eat (71). She explains that she stood &#8220;up to (her) knees in the water&#8221; and because they &#8220;worked through the heat of the day ... salt blisters [formed] in those parts [of the body] which were not completely covered&#8221; (71-2). Speaking for herself and other members of this enslaved population, she recounts how &#8220;[o]ur feet and legs, from standing in salt water for so many hours, soon became full of dreadful boils, which eat down in some cases to the very bone&#8221; (72). Thus pickled, they would return to the salt ponds every day except for Sunday. &#8220;On Sundays,&#8221; she narrates, &#8220;we went into the bush and cut the long soft grass, of which we made trusses for our legs and feet to rest upon, for they were so full of salt boils that we could get no rest lying upon the bare boards&#8221; (72). Even her supposed day of rest is spent in reaction to the salt she would otherwise be laboring to produce. It cannot be overemphasized that upon Prince&#8217;s arrival at Turks Island, nearly every moment of her waking life centered on salt. Compounding the extent to which salt eats away at the majority of Prince&#8217;s wakeful hours spent on Turks Island, the bodily wounds she incurs from salt mining prohibited even the prospect of healing sleep.</p>
<p class=""><strong>13</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Alongside Prince&#8217;s gruesome catalogue, spawned out of an almost ubiquitous physical presence of and proximity to salt, are the seemingly unconscious references to a salt-based existence that penetrates much more than her flesh. Sodium chloride invades her being and narrative like a virus. On a level far beyond the possible morphology or contortion of being perpetrated by any number of inhumane slave labor practices embedded within Caribbean or North American mainland sugar production processes, salt laborers are consumed by the commodity they labor to produce; as the salt wounds fester, deepen, and increasingly mutate the body, these laborers become hypersalinated humans, undergoing a cruel sea change, mentally as well as physically. Not only does salt become the crux of Prince&#8217;s existence on Turks Island&#8212;she is literally a slave to salt and rarely allowed to pursue anything outside fostering its production&#8212;but, additionally, she frames her existence through the lens of salt.</p>
<p class=""><strong>14</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Discussions of various moments throughout her life often disclose how this decade as a salt laborer marks her psychically. As she laments being separated from her family, a rupture that took place long before she worked salt but which she narrates after slaving on Turks Island, she discloses how the &#8220;trials&#8221; of her life as a slave &#8220;make the <em xmlns="">salt water</em> come into my eyes when I think of the days in which I was afflicted&#8212;the times that are gone; when I mourned and grieved with a young heart for those whom I loved&#8221; (64; emphasis added). The same commodity that corrodes this enslaved body of labor also assumes a descriptive placeholder for Prince&#8217;s tears and consumes her emotionally. After she leaves Turks Island and serves as a domestic slave on the island of Bermuda, Prince describes how she finds her &#8220;master beating his daughter,&#8221; and how she attempts to intercede until he &#8220;began to lick (her) [with a lash]. Then (she) said, &#8216;Sir, this is not Turk&#8217;s Island&#8217;&#8221; (77). Revisiting Prince&#8217;s narrative with special attention to the salt trade, the term &#8220;lick&#8221; bears an especially disturbing resonance because of the traditional place of a salt lick, being what hunters set out to lure game. However, this particular moment also marks how Prince associates the place name of Turks Island with a space of exceptional and irregular wrongs&#8212;an alternate moral universe where travesties of justice become admissible. Likewise, in a poignant but brief consideration of salt in Charlotte Sussman&#8217;s book on commodities of consumption, she notes how Prince&#8217;s diction links the &#8220;sentimental recollections [that] &#8216;make salt water&#8217;&#8221; spring from the eyes to the &#8220;physical labor involved in producing salt, and the physical pain of being made to drink
saltwater.&#8221; Sussman acknowledges that this phenomenon implies a close tie between &#8220;sentimental affect and the material conditions of Caribbean slave women,&#8221; a tie, further, that surpasses that of other abolitionist texts (153-4).</p>
<p class=""><strong>15</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Within a critical tradition that refuses to imbue Prince&#8217;s narrative with the truth-value granted to self-penned slave narratives, critics like Gillian Whitlock have nevertheless uncovered how this text carries the historical heft that it has long enjoyed. Whitlock underscores how those passages dedicated to figurations of the body and bodily harm have fared better historically, and have been readily taken as true or truthfully representative of Prince&#8217;s lived experience. Whitlock notes the following: &#8220;[u]ltimately, the inscriptions of flogging on the body of the Caribbean woman, a body made grotesque and painful by abuse, are what speak authentically to the good people of England&#8221; (<span xmlns="" class="titlem">Intimate</span> 23). I would like to suggest that the audience might not read the bodily images incorporated into this narrative as exclusively as Whitlock implies, or with a truth value different to that which they grant to other elements of Prince&#8217;s text. But regardless, Whitlock&#8217;s observations prove valuable to my project because they reveal how Prince&#8217;s record of bodily horrors did and may still ring true for many readers, which in turn, could then add substance and authority to those metaphors and associations she links to salt-induced transfigurations of the body.</p>
<p class=""><strong>16</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Adding to the various examples that demonstrate how Prince&#8217;s time as a salt laborer becomes a metaphoric or associative touchstone, emotional disclosures are in fact continually linked to detrimental bodily encounters with salt. As Prince launches into her final account of the ten years she slaves in the salt marshes she completes her chronicle of Turks Island with a portrayal of a brutally mistreated old slave named Sarah, who was &#8220;beaten severely,&#8221; and &#8220;flung &#8230; among the prickly-pear bushes, which [were] all covered over with sharp venomous prickles. By this,&#8221; Prince continues, &#8220;her naked flesh was so grievously wounded, that her body swelled and festered all over, and she died a few days after&#8221; (75). This specific scene of a slave woman&#8217;s death, brought on by wounded flesh paired with a swollen and festering body, does not complete Prince&#8217;s dictation of the life of a salt laborer by accident. Rather, this narrative arrangement displays a subtle link functioning in Prince&#8217;s mind and propelling her narrative, a train of thought that fuses images of paramount and painful bodily transformations and punishments with the space and labor of the Turks Island salt ponds. Much in the same way, and not more than a sentence later, she remarks,</p>
<div class="blockquote">I think it was about ten years I had worked &#8230; at Turk&#8217;s Island, when my master left off business, and retired to a house in Bermuda, leaving his son to succeed him in the island. He took me with him to wait upon his daughters; and I was joyful, for I was sick, sick of Turk&#8217;s Island, and my heart yearned to see my native place again, my mother, and my kindred. (75-6)</div>
<p class=""><strong>17</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;The fact that Prince so enthusiastically embraces a different mode of slave labor underscores the especially compromising conditions she endures raking salt. Additionally, the confession that she is &#8220;sick, sick of Turk&#8217;s Island&#8221; can signify not only on the level of the figurative, but also in the literal sense, especially when paired with the following information regarding the type of medical treatment Prince and other slaves were granted there. In a sadly ironic turn, Prince discloses how her overseer at Turks Island attempts to treat illness with a supposed salt-cure. Prince explains, &#8220;when we were ill, [&#8230;] the only medicine given to us was a great bowl of hot salt water, with salt mixed with it, which made us very sick&#8221; (73). In stating that their only &#8220;medicine&#8221; is salt, Prince successfully portrays a complete merger of labor, land, and body.</p>
<p class=""><strong>18</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Shortly after these reflections, Prince remembers a moment taken from &#8220;the time [that she] was a slave on Turk&#8217;s Island&#8221; when she finally gets to see her mother (76). A ship arrives in port loaded with more slaves imported to work the salt flats, and her mother happens to be aboard the vessel. Prince divulges that she &#8220;could scarcely believe&#8221; this news, &#8220;but when [she] saw [her] poor mammy [her] joy was turned to sorrow, for she had gone from her senses.&#8221; She then narrates how her mother &#8220;began to talk foolishly, and said that she had been under the vessel&#8217;s bottom&#8221; (76). Salt water quite obviously not only stands in ponds for raking salt, but encompasses the oceans that all slaves were forced to travel when they were brought to work in the colonies. Although Prince&#8217;s enslaved mother does not work in the salt ponds, she too reaches her compromised state from within a damaging cocoon of oceanic salt water. This fluid series of connections is paralleled literally by the porous nature of the skin and psyche which for Prince have both been soaked in salt&#8212;a process that opens physical and psychic wounds as it exposes both her exterior and interior body to the potentially threatening substance.</p>
<p class=""><strong>19</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Prince characterizes a tortured life lived in saline, but she also narrates salt-related mortification and death&#8212;a slow manifestation of dying also instigated by crystals of salt&#8212;and so figures a complete circle of salt-saturated life, a trajectory of being filtered almost entirely through the commodity she is forced to slave for. Prince writes:</p>
<div class="blockquote">Work&#8212;work&#8212;work&#8212;Oh that Turk&#8217;s Island was a horrible place! The people in England, I am sure, have never found out what is carried on there. Cruel, horrible place!</div>
<div class="blockquote">Mr. D&#8212; had a slave called old Daniel, whom he used to treat in the most cruel manner. Poor Daniel was lame in the hip, and could not keep up with the rest of the slaves; and our master would order him to be stripped and laid down on the ground, and have him beaten with a rod of rough briar till his skin was quite red and raw. He would then call for a bucket of salt, and fling [it] upon the raw flesh till the man writhed on the ground like a worm, and screamed aloud with agony. This poor man&#8217;s wounds were never healed, and I have often seen them full of maggots, which increased his torments to an intolerable degree. He was an object of pity and terror to the whole gang of slaves, and in his wretched case we saw, each of us, our own lot, if we should live to be as old. (73-4)</div>
In <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Sucking Salt</span> Meredith Gadsby identifies how &#8216;&#8220;seasoning,&#8217; or the agony of a whipped slave whose bleeding wounds are rubbed with salt or washed with brine&#8212;and the simultaneous necessary dependence on salt for sufficient seasoning of foods speak to the notions of balance and excess&#8221; (10). Prince characterizes Daniel&#8217;s torture by salt-lash, which Gadsby reminds us is termed &#8220;seasoning&#8221; in the colonial Caribbean vernacular, as a feasible future for the &#8220;whole gang of slaves,&#8221; who go through excessive and brutal salt-induced reconfigurations of body and mind in order to provide the &#8220;sufficient seasoning of foods&#8221; that meets the needs of multiple national projects and kitchen tables. Moreover, Prince&#8217;s disturbing narrative of how &#8220;poor. . . Daniel&#8217;s . . . wounds were never healed&#8221; parallels the course of her own life both in the West Indies and later in England. When she reports her story to her amanuensis, and although she is nominally &#8220;free&#8221; in England, at least a decade after her salting days, she has not healed either bodily or psychologically. Like Daniel&#8217;s story, hers does not end in death or any substantive freedom, but in suffering, both of them possessing transformed bodies abandoned to a narratological limbo or an eternal hell, where their mutilated external forms perpetually display a tormented subject within.
<p class=""><strong>20</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Prince, who narratologically expresses her knowledge of the mental and physical abuses her masters inflict upon her, also depicts what could amount to a type of bodily speech or protest during the latter years of her life, which take place in England. Notably, withstanding the fact that England held slavery to be illegal since the 1772 Mansfield decision in the Somerset case, and that Prince adopts the name of Molly Wood, accompanying her West Indian master (Mr. Wood) and mistress across the Atlantic with future freedom in mind, she was not granted any such liberty upon arrival (86). As Ferguson&#8217;s archival work avers, in 1829 and after Prince&#8217;s <span xmlns="" class="titlem">History</span> was drafted, she unsuccessfully petitioned the House of Lords for her freedom (127). Now living in England and under the last master she introduces in her narrative, Prince details how she is now &#8220;quite cripple;&#8221; &#8220;I soon fell ill of the rheumatism, and grew so very lame that I was forced to walk with a stick . . . . I was ill a long long time; for several months I could not lift [a] limb&#8221; (79). Prince&#8217;s body revolts, refuses to continue to submit to the demands laid down by impossible labor expectations. The relation of Prince&#8217;s own bodily disfigurement suggests that she ought to have put down her toil no matter what sort of system of labor required it. The intense labor Prince performs wreaks havoc upon her flesh, propelling her to her &#8220;crippled&#8221; state. However, Prince&#8217;s <span xmlns="" class="titlem">History</span> is rarely examined as a critique of damaging labor practices, although the inhumane salt raking processes presented in her narrative would outlast chattel slavery.</p>
<p class=""><strong>21</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;The troubling encounters Prince recites heighten the specificity and novelty of salt labor simply because this commodity merges with the laboring body to such a great extent&#8212; perhaps comparable only to those arduous and intrusive tasks born by coal and lead miners who were likewise compromised by their work environments. Salt literally breaches the boundary between the commodity and the laboring body. After Prince works in the salt flats of Turks Island, she emerges from her labor greatly changed. She is cannibalized by salt; she exists as a human commodity, a slave, and harvests a commodity, salt, that devours her flesh. This economy of cannibalism and corporeal alteration entails an existential transformation. Tales of raw, grated flesh incurred from brutal labor or slavery practices are not new, but here we are introduced to a story that serves as a critique not simply of slave labor, but also of what would prove to be standard labor practices found in the Caribbean salt industry even after slavery was abolished. Prince&#8217;s narrative underscores the particularity of this unique historic and geographic context as the body loses a contest of differentiation with salt, its co-commodity.</p>
<p class=""><strong>22</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Prince seeks to escape this threatening saline world in an idealized Britain; according to her history, the sheer horror of her salt-drenched state drives Prince to evoke her definition of Anglo-Saxon values, which she juxtaposes against what qualify as distinctly un-English acts perpetrated by who those who crossed the Atlantic. When Prince invokes a singularly English ethical code and exclaims that the &#8220;people in England,&#8221; surely, &#8220;have never found out what is carried on&#8221; at Turks Island, she rehearses an abolitionist view, purporting these enslaved populations to be systemically dependent upon British subjects. Moreover, the rhetorical charge she lofts upon a particularly English ethos fantastically subordinates not only the slaveholders and abolitionists but also the enslaved populace in the colonies to an idealized public across the sea, as she reinvests powerful authority in a body of English people who, by this line of reasoning, could feasibly halt the brutalization that American abolitionists, or any enslaved individuals, seemingly cannot. Prince appeals to her English readership, announcing, &#8220;I am often much vexed, and feel great sorrow when I hear some people in [England] say, that the slaves do not need better usage, and do not want to be free. They believe the foreign people who deceive them, and say slaves are happy. I say, Not so&#8221; (93). Prince attempts to use her identity&#8212;not that of a British subject but that of a &#8220;freed&#8221; slave on British soil&#8212;to include her pleas within a national popular fantasy, one of an inherently freedom-centric &#8220;English people&#8221; (93, 94). Jenny Sharpe&#8217;s consideration of Prince&#8217;s <span xmlns="" class="titlem">History</span> provides a particularly instructive discussion on the deployment of strategic tropes and omissions within various abolitionist-backed slave
narratives. Prince&#8217;s text enacts this type of rhetorical move, especially where she paints the fate of any and all enslaved bodies of people in the British-held West Indies as being determined exclusively by citizens living in England. Sharpe compellingly argues that such narrative devices covered over and ignored the agency exhibited by slaves who ran away, revolted, or escaped slavery without nationalized or outside aid of any kind (124-127).</p>
<p class=""><strong>23</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;In addition to Sharpe&#8217;s foundational work, a more recent article by Kremena Todorova also recognizes Prince&#8217;s nationalized rhetoric and how her narrative plays into British exceptionalism. Todorova writes, &#8220;[i]n the discourse originated by [Prince&#8217;s] <span xmlns="" class="titlem">History</span>, the English character and identity are consistently shielded from implications of immorality. Even though plantocrats and abolitionists [were] divided over the question of slavery, both sides avow[ed] their endorsement of a glorious English national identity&#8221; (299). However, Prince&#8217;s story subtly interrogates just how well England measures up to this ideal by depicting the horrors that British men and women perpetrate on both sides of the Atlantic. Even as she relates how her mistress &#8220;stripped and flogged her,&#8221; which she follows with a report of her master &#8220;abusing [her] with every ill name he could think of,&#8221; she censors herself and does not repeat any of these damning expletives, deeming them to be &#8220;(too, too bad to speak in England)&#8221; (68). Through such reticence she pays homage to an idealized version of an upright English nation, and Prince suggests, by definition, that even unjust words, let alone acts, cannot be pronounced or performed upon its righteous soil. By extension, such passages beg the question of why these expletives are somehow permissible on British-held soil, and implore one to question the practices and qualities of the English men and women who operate in this way.</p>
<p class=""><strong>24</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Prince&#8217;s work as a salt laborer, status as a female slave, and affiliation with the British West Indies allow her to import startling eyewitness testimony to her now nearby English readers. She retrieves and salvages stories amassed from the very realms that contorted her subjectivity and human form, delivering them to English citizens who are complicit with the abuses exacted within Britain&#8217;s colonial holdings. She absorbs even the bodily impact of the oceanic voyage many English subjects never took, in addition to the tolls exacted in and out of the salt marshes. &#8220;This is slavery&#8221; she explains: &#8220;I tell it to let the English people know the truth&#8221; (94). In moments like these, Prince also helps to define what English morality is or should be. Strikingly similar to Hegel&#8217;s analysis of the "Lord and the Bondsman," this unchosen yet pivotal role tasks Prince in a way that transforms her physically and mentally under slavery. In addition, it confirms Prince&#8217;s position as a black female orator or narrator and occupant of what Paul Gilroy has established as the black diaspora&#8217;s inside/outside locality within Modernity, enabling her narrative to carry special weight.<a href="#8">&#160;[8]</a><a name="back8">&#160;</a></p>
<p class=""><strong>25</strong>.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Read in light of the historical documents compiled here, we can see how the fruit of Prince&#8217;s torturous labor filled the pockets of British colonial investors, and fed scores of American colonists during that nation&#8217;s quest for revolutionary freedoms. However, the realities of salt production under slavery corrode the liberatory claims of both nations. This, I have attempted to argue, is the type of implicit critique produced in the numerous occasions where Prince juxtaposes British idealism with harrowing tales of the everyday drudgery she experiences on Turks Island and back in Britain. Indeed, Prince contributes to absolutist visions of British exceptionalism, replete with discourses of British liberty, justice, and righteousness, but her version of this exceptionalism insists on recognizing that these laudable standards be necessarily counterpoised to those propagated in the salt works in which she slaved. In her narrative, Prince, like others forced into the salt industry, materially preserves two nations while the very salt she unwillingly rakes continually corrodes and eats at her flesh and soul. The various trials of unfreedom and the psychological and physical injury Prince endures not only produce a deformed body and a reformulated consciousness, but also spawn her multivalenced testimony. Such physical and mental legacies emerge from her intimate knowledge and experience, and like the material history of salt in this Caribbean slave economy and its crucial place in North American revolutionary life, they might be lost to us without her narrative.</p>
</div>
<div class="citations" id="body.1_div.2">
<h3 align="center">Works Cited</h3>
<div type="listBibl">
<p class="hang">Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion</span>. <span xmlns="" class="titles">The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge</span>Ed. L Patton and P Mann. Vol 1. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Equiano, Olaudah. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa</span>. Ed. Angelo Costanzo. Toronto: Broadview P, 2002. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Ferguson, Moira. "Introduction to the Revised Edition." Prince, Mary. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself</span>. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Fox, William. "An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Utility of Refraining from the Use of West India Sugar and Rum." <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Radical Food: The Culture and Politics of Eating and Drinking, 1790-1820</span>. Ed. Timothy Morton. Vol 1. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Gadsby, Meredith. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration and Survival</span>. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2006. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Gilroy, Paul. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness</span>. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Hegel, G.W.F. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Phenomenology of Spirit</span>. Trans. A.V Miller. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Holroyd, John (Earl of Sheffield). <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Observations on the Commerce of the American States with Europe and the West Indies; Including the Several Articles of Import and Export. Also, An Essay on Canon and Feudal Law By John Adams, Esquire; Ambassador Plenipotentiary, From the United And Independent States of North America, to Their High Mightinesses the States General of the United Provinces of Holland To Which is Annexed, the Political Character of the Said John Adams, Esquire; By an American Price Half a Dollar</span>. Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1783. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Mellor, Anne. "&#8216;Am I not a Woman, and a Sister?&#8217;: Slavery, Romanticism, and Gender" <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834</span>. Ed. Alan Richardson. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Morton, Timothy. "Blood Sugar." <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830</span>. Ed. Tim Fulford and Peter J Kitson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">---. "Introduction." <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Radical Food: The Culture and Politics of Eating and Drinking, 1790-1820</span>. Ed. Timothy Morton. Vol 1. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">---. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic</span>. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Prince, Mary. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself</span>. Ed. Moira Ferguson. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">---. "Mary Prince&#8217;s Petition Presented to Parliament on June 24, 1829 Records Office, House of Lords." <span xmlns="" class="titlej">Common Journal</span> LXXXIV: 404. Ferguson, Moira, ed. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Related by Herself</span>. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">"<a class="link_ref" href="http://tcmuseum.org/culture-history/salt-industry/" title="Salt Industry">Salt Industry</a>." <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Turks and Caicos Islands National Museum</span>. [n.p.]: [n.p.], 3 June 2007. Web.</p>
<p class="hang">Sharpe, Jenny. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women's Lives</span>. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Sussman, Charlotte. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery 1713-1833</span>. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2000. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Todorova, Kremena. "&#8216;I Will Say the Truth to the English People&#8217;: The History of Mary Prince and the Meaning of English History." <span xmlns="" class="titlej">Texas Studies in Literature and Language</span> 433 (2001): 285-302. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Washington, George. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources 1745-1799</span>. Ed. Fitzpatrick John C. Vol 14. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1936. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Wheatley, Phyllis. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Complete Writings</span>. Ed. Vincent Carretta. New York: Penguin Group, 2001. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Whitlock, Gillian. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Intimate Empire: Reading Women's Autobiography</span>. London: Cassell, 2000. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Whitlock, Gillian. "Volatile Subjects: The History of Mary Prince." <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic</span>. Ed. Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2001. Print.</p>
<p class="hang">Winterbotham, William. <span xmlns="" class="titlem">An Historical, Geographical, Commercial, and Philosophical view of the United States of America, and of the European Settlements in America and the West-Indies</span>. Vol 4. New York: Tiebout and O&#8217;Brien, 1796. Print.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div class="notes">
<div class="noteHeading">
<h3>Notes</h3>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="1">[1]</a> Without the sterling editorial guidance provided by my mentors, Jeffrey N. Cox and Jillian Heydt-Stevenson and the insightful and challenging questions tossed at me by way of my colleagues Scott Hagele and John C. Leffel, this essay would not have been possible. My gratitude goes out to each of them for helping me to think through the many nuances at play in this historical narrative. I would also like to thank Donald Pease for granting me the opportunity to workshop a draft of this article at the 2008 Futures of American Studies Institute, where I benefited from the advice of Gabriel Briggs, Michael Chaney, Michael Germana, L&#224;zaro Lima, Alan Nadal, and Rachel Watson. <a href="#back1">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="2">[2]</a> The British Abolition of Slave Trade Act of 1807 finally achieved this result. <a href="#back2">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="3">[3]</a> Historically, slave narratives did not enjoy widespread or easy credibility, and debates over their veracity continue to find voice today. Prince&#8217;s contested narrative follows those such as Olaudah Equiano and Phyllis Wheatley among others, which were also produced with various paratextual materials so as to validate their authenticity, often coming with oaths and affirmations of truth from established white abolitionist subjects. In addition, unlike the work of Equiano or Wheatley, Prince&#8217;s narrative is not self-penned, which has only added to the controversy surrounding this particular document. <a href="#back3">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="4">[4]</a> For both British and North American critical scholarship on the questions of authorship and agency in Prince&#8217;s narrative see Moira Ferguson, Introduction to the Revised Edition, <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself,</span> by Mary Prince (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997) 1-51; Anne Mellor, "&#8216;Am I not a Woman, and a Sister?&#8217;: Slavery, Romanticism, and Gender," <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834</span>, ed. Alan Richardson (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996) 311-29; Jenny Sharpe, "A Very Troublesome Woman." <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women's Lives</span> (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003) 120-52; Gillian Whitlock, "Volatile Subjects: The History of Mary Prince," <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic</span>, eds. Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2001) 72-86; Gillian Whitlock, "Autobiography and Slavery: Believing the <em xmlns="">History</em> of Mary Prince." <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Intimate Empire: Reading Women's Autobiography</span> (London: Cassell, 2000) 8-29. <a href="#back4">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="5">[5]</a> Mary Prince, <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself</span>, ed. Moira Ferguson (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997) 71-2. Hereafter cited parenthetically. <a href="#back5">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="6">[6]</a> Morton, Timothy, "Blood Sugar," <span xmlns="" class="titlem">Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830</span>, eds. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) 87-106. <a href="#back6">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="7">[7]</a> "Salt Industry," <span xmlns="" class="titlem"><a xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="link_ref" href="http://tcmuseum.org/culture-history/salt-industry/" title="Turks and Caicos Islands National Museum">Turks and Caicos Islands National Museum</a></span>, 3 June 2007 par. 3. All parenthetical citations for information provided by the Turks and Caicos Island National Museum refer to the text posted electronically on their webpage, and the numbers provided as citations from this source reflect paragraph numbers in place of page numbers. <a href="#back7">BACK</a></p>
</div>
<div class="note">
<p class="letnote"><a name="8">[8]</a> Paul Gilroy notes how England&#8217;s cultural imagination has been shaped traditionally by those populations that have been largely excluded or deemed to be outsiders. He writes, &#8220;The fact that some of the most potent conceptions of Englishness have been constructed by alien outsiders like Carlyle, Swift, Scott, or Eliot should augment the note of caution sounded here. The most heroic subaltern English nationalism and counter cultural patriotisms are perhaps better understood as having been generated in a complex pattern of antagonistic relationships with the supra-national and imperial world for which the ideas of &#8216;race,&#8217; nationality and national culture provide primary (though not the only) indices.&#8221; Paul Gilroy, <span xmlns="" class="titlem">The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness</span> (Cambridge: Harvard UP 1993) 11. <a href="#back8">BACK</a></p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/speitz-michele">Speitz, Michele</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/mary-prince-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mary Prince</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/salt" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">salt</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1667" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">slavery</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/labor" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">labor</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/caribbean" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">caribbean</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/west-indies" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">west indies</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/british-colonialism" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">British colonialism</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/us-revolution" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">U.S. revolution</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/blood-sugar-topos" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">blood sugar topos</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/black-atlantic" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">black atlantic</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/consumer-politics" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">consumer politics</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/gwf-hegel" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">G.W.F. Hegel</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/paul-gilroy-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Paul Gilroy</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/timothy-morton" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Timothy Morton</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/slave-narrative" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">slave narrative</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1052" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">literary history</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/autobiography" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">autobiography</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/abolitionist-literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">abolitionist literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/gillian-whitlock" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Gillian Whitlock</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/thomas-pringle" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Thomas Pringle</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/timothy-morton" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Timothy Morton</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/moira-ferguson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Moira Ferguson</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/william-fox" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Fox</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/mary-prince-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mary Prince</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/bermuda" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bermuda</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/great-britain" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Great Britain</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/united-states" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">United States</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-region-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Region:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/region/caribbean" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Caribbean</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/region/west-indies" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">West Indies</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Continent:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/north-america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">North America</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/continent/europe" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Europe</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/americas" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Americas</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-naturalfeature-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NaturalFeature:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/natural-feature/grand-turk-island" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Grand Turk Island</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/natural-feature/indies" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Indies</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 01 May 2012 23:04:55 +0000rc-admin22999 at http://www.rc.umd.eduNewman, "Introduction: A History of Transatlantic Romanticism"http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/sullenfires/intro/intro.html
<div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/sullenfires/index.html">Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic: Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div id="title">
<div align="center">
<h2>Sullen Fires Across the
Atlantic:<br />
Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism</h2>
</div>
<h3 align="center">Introduction: A History of Transatlantic Romanticism</h3>
<h4 align="center">Lance Newman, California State University, San Marcos</h4>
</div>
<div id="content">
<ol>
<li>
<p>Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1840 that "the fame of
Wordsworth is a leading fact in modern literature,"
calling the poet a "divine savage" and acknowledging
that "Wordsworth now act[s] out of England on us...."
Just as true was that Americans acted reciprocally on
Wordsworth. As the poet noted in a letter to his U.S.
editor, Henry Reed, the "acknowledgements which I
receive from the vast continent of America are among
the most grateful that reach me." He went on to
exclaim: "What a vast field is there open to the
English mind, acting through our noble language!"
Wordsworth does strike a pose of condescension here,
acting the part of the generous master. Nevertheless,
it is clear that his sense of his own importance, of
his significance as a public figure, is framed in
relation to an international readership. He speaks to a
community of readers defined not by a common
nationality, but by a common culture.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>William Keach, in his contribution to a recent
exchange on how to periodize Romanticism, argues that
"all forms of merely habitual national one-sidedness
(are) a serious barrier to critical advance" and that
"the grounds on which we claim the continuing relevance
and coherence of a &lsquo;romantic century&rsquo; need
to be transatlantic" (31). This news is both old and
new. For like Wordsworth and Emerson, the British and
American Romantics took their movement&rsquo;s
transatlanticism for granted. But despite the
self-conscious internationalism of the Romantics
themselves, most twentieth-century critics and cultural
historians have attempted, in ways that are quite
destructive of full understanding, to isolate discrete
national literatures and cultures: English literature
and American literature.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Critical nationalism has not been a matter of simple
regression. After all, "English literature" was a
Romantic innovation, part of the British Empire&rsquo;s
invention of a deep past to authorize its newly
acquired power. In <em>Walden</em>, Henry Thoreau
describes his reverent absorption of that tradition:
during his senior year at Harvard, he ignored his
official studies and labored to consume Alexander
Chalmers&rsquo;s twenty-one-volume collection of the
British poets, claiming that he read it through
"without skipping" (259). The power to command such
attention, the cultural authority of British
literature, was such that American literature, both as
an object of study and as a scholarly discipline in the
U.S., was invented both in opposition to it
<em>and</em> by analogy with it.<a href=
"#1">[1]</a>
When the U.S. did eventually replace Britain as the
world&rsquo;s dominant imperial power, American
literature came to perform the same cultural work,
providing a warrant for domination. Thus, during
mid-century, the business of American cultural
historians was to anatomize the triumphant "American
Mind," with a special focus on its "renaissance" during
the Romantic century. From time to time, influence
studies appeared that recalled the responsiveness to
British antecedents that afflicted even the most
respectably original American Romantic authors. Not
surprisingly, defenders of the national canon, like
Perry Miller in his "Thoreau in the Context of
International Romanticism" (1961), compensated for the
resulting discomfort by asserting confidently that the
canonical texts of the American Renaissance were the
culminating achievements of Romanticism as a
whole.<a href=
"#2">[2]</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The first sustained account of Romanticism in a
transatlantic context came in Stephen Spender&rsquo;s
<em>Love-Hate Relations</em> (1974), a book that was
based on a series of lectures delivered at Cambridge
University in 1965 and that set out to examine an</p>
<blockquote>
awareness felt particularly by writers (because it
has a lot to do with living within the language of
their birth) of the connection between their separate
existence and their country, in its history,
landscape and people. This awareness is of a life
which is that of an ideal United States or England
which the writer, if he is in a correct relation to
it, releases in his work. Unless he does have such a
relation, his work will be peripheral to that center
or turned inward upon itself. (xxi)
</blockquote>
<p>Spender argues that American writers formed their
sense of the significance of their "patria" by
"comparing their idea of European civilization with
their own county&rsquo;s force and vitality. They
either reacted against Europe or they gravitated
towards it, but the shadow image of England and Europe
qualified their attitudes to their own country and
state of culture" (xxvi). Spender looks to the Romantic
period for the origin these "love-hate relations,"
arguing that while British readers were scarcely aware
of American culture, the American literary community
faced a "dilemma: the combination of political
independence and cultural colonization" (8). As a
result, that community was deeply divided between those
who "regarded England and its traditions as undermining
their freedom of development" (xx) and those who "saw
America as deadened by its &lsquo;materialism,&rsquo;
and Europe as the center of spiritual values." These
attitudes could coexist in the same person. For
instance, Spender describes Emerson&rsquo;s ambivalence
toward his hosts during a visit to Europe: "he felt, as
an American, &lsquo;almost an invalid&rsquo; when he
compared himself with the English, although he managed,
at much the same time, to feel that the English were
aging parents of the strong independent American
children who had left them behind, on their exhausted
island" (4). Spender, with his focus on national
identity as the definitive analytical category, and his
almost mystical way of describing authors as uniquely
constitutive and representative of that identity,
articulates what had been common sense through decades
of old historicism. <a href=
"#3">[3]</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Almost simultaneous with the appearance of
<em>Love-Hate Relations</em>, Harold Bloom published
<em>The Anxiety of Influence</em> (1973). Bloom&rsquo;s
study does not specifically consider transatlantic
literary relations, since he conceives of literary
traditions and history as a matter of supranational
interactions between individual authors. Nevertheless,
his notion of "poetic misprision" elevated to the level
of theory Spender&rsquo;s donnish comments on British
oblivion and American anxiety. According to Bloom,
strong poets construct fruitful misreadings of their
forebears from whose influence they need to escape in
order to discover their own individuality. Thus, the
American Romantics were engaged in "a hidden civil war"
with their British predecessors (12). This
psychologistic narrative of maturation allowed for a
schematic, even mechanical representation of
transatlantic cultural relations. The process of
American differentiation from the British tradition was
isolated as the centrally important drama of the
period, and came to be read as a family romance with a
foregone conclusion. The study of transatlantic
Romanticism was dominated for more than a decade by
versions of this simple plot: influence, imitation,
anxiety, rejection, and independence. The position
received its most resolute, even absolute, statement in
<em>Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and
British Influence in the Age of Emerson</em> (1986), in
which Robert Weisbuch describes what he calls the
"American secret": "I believe that the American writer
begins from a defensive position and that the
achievements of British literature and British national
life are the chief intimidations against which he, as
American representative, defends himself" (ix, xii).
Together, Bloom and Weisbuch, gave the weight of
finality to the idea that American literature only
becomes truly American, only achieves "independence"
from the "burden of Britain," when its authors invent
native forms capable of rendering the true character of
a unique American experience.<a href=
"#4">[4]</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>A closely related but significantly divergent
position was mapped out by Leon Chai&rsquo;s <em>The
Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance</em>
(1987), which articulates perhaps the most
sophisticated version of the dependency and maturation
hypothesis. Chai argues that "the American Renaissance
[was] the final phase of a movement that begins with
European Romanticism," a phase characterized by formal
self-consciousness and even mannerism:</p>
<blockquote>
After certain aesthetic or conceptual norms attain
the level of conscious expression...they become
fraught with extraordinary tensions that prevent the
possibility of their perpetuation. What so often
results might be described as a subjectivization of
those norms, that is, their externalization into the
medium of expression itself, and a simultaneous inner
transformation of their content and significance.
(xii)
</blockquote>
<p>While Chai implies a reversed valuation of the
process of transatlantic influence, like Weisbuch, he
accepts the logic of national competition. And both,
together with Spender and Bloom, reduce what is a
complex process of mutual, but unequal, influence, into
tautological narratives of individuation, either of
whole cultures, or of their individual
representatives.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Three books, published almost simultaneously in the
early 1990s, subjected what had gone before to rigorous
reappraisal and set the study of transatlantic
Romanticism on a definitive new tack. Perhaps the most
absolute reaction against the nationalist consensus
came in Richard Brantley&rsquo;s <em>Coordinates of
Anglo-American Romanticism</em> (1993). In the course
of an account of the influence of "the twin pioneers of
transatlantic revivalism," John Wesley and Jonathon
Edwards, on the "empirical evangelical methodology" of
Emerson and Carlyle, Brantley argues that "the two
national literatures are one." (8, 4, 6). Moreover, he
turns a Bloomian narrative of maturation on the
critical tradition itself, arguing that "American
literature, now having come of age, having shed the
&lsquo;adolescent&rsquo; insecurity that demanded
independence from tradition, no longer needs to insist
on complete separation from the literature of England.
&lsquo;Anglo-American&rsquo; literature emerges as a
valid concept" (1).<a href=
"#5">[5]</a>
Similarly, Stephen Fender&rsquo;s <em>Sea Changes:
British Emigration and American Literature</em> (1992)
applies a post-national perspective to "the rite of
passage in which the experience of emigration was
inscribed," arguing that it "contributed to the
formation of [American] national consciousness and the
literature which reflected and conditioned it" (13).
Fender describes what he calls "the discourse of
anglophone emigration," showing how it "underpins the
very self-definition of the United States of America"
(5). At the same time, the <em>discourse</em> of
emigration played a central role in the self-definition
of Britain, for "after American independence, during
the unrest that followed the Napoleonic Wars, British
progressives and conservatives began to inscribe the
domestic debate for and against reform within an
argument about the viability of the new republic across
the Atlantic, and particularly about the wisdom of
emigrating there" (10).<a href=
"#6">[6]</a>
Third, Paul Gilroy&rsquo;s <em>Black Atlantic:
Modernity and Double Consciousness</em> (1993)
fruitfully complicates Brantley and Fender&rsquo;s
internationalism by emphasizing the central importance
of the Triangle Trade as a force for cultural mixing.
But in doing so Gilroy, like Brantley and Fender,
overcorrects. Attempting to produce an antidote to "the
tragic popularity of ideas about the integrity and
purity of cultures" (7), Gilroy overemphasizes figures
of hybridity, producing a utopian retrospective of the
period that threatens to erase the substantial
differentials of cultural power around the Atlantic
Rim.<a href=
"#7">[7]</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Two recent volumes have struck the fine balance so
long needed, setting a new standard for empirical
cultural analysis that is freed of nationalist
distortions but closely attentive to the power of
nationalism as one of the most fundamental structures
of identity during the Romantic century. In
<em>Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and
the Formation of American Literature, 1730-1860</em>
(2001), Paul Giles produces a cultural history of the
period that, on one hand, speaks to the diversity of
literary expression in English along the Atlantic Rim
and, on the other, recognizes just how rigidly
concentric that world was, just how solidly London sat
at the center of the literary universe as it was then
mapped both by the English, their subjects, and their
former possessions. On one hand, Giles shows how "the
emergence of autonomous and separate political
identities during this era can be seen as intertwined
with a play of opposites, a series of reciprocal
attractions and repulsions between opposing national
situations" (1). Giles dwells on "figures of mirroring
and twinning," showing how "British and American
cultural narratives tended to develop...as heretical
alternatives to each other" (2). At the same time, he
is careful not to erase the period&rsquo;s hierarchies
of national power:</p>
<blockquote>
To restore an American dimension to British
literature of this period is to denaturalize it, to
suggest the historical contingencies that helped
formulate the dynamics of Augustan order and imperial
control. Conversely, to restore a British dimension
to American literature is to politicize it: to reveal
its intertwinement with the discourses of heresy,
blasphemy, and insurrection, rather than
understanding that writing as an expression of local
cultures or natural rights. (10-11) <a href=
"#8">[8]</a>
</blockquote>
<p>This is the kind of sensitively historicist approach
we need to understand the period&rsquo;s complex and
fluid co-evolution of British and American literary
cultures and national identities. <em>Transatlantic
Insurrections</em> demonstrates the transnational
interdependence of national cultures, showing that it
is "easier to see what American literature embraces and
omits by comparing it to British literature, just as
American literature from a reverse perspective
manifests itself as British literature&rsquo;s
shadow-self, the kind of culture it might have been,
but wasn&rsquo;t" (195).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Richard Gravil&rsquo;s <em>Romantic Dialogues:
Anglo-American Continuities, 1776-1862</em> (2000)
describes the multivalent circulation of ideas around
the Atlantic rim as driven by both broad historical
trends and specific local events. The American
Revolution provided an important catalyst for the
crystallization of early British Romanticism and
remained a touchstone for its later phases: "The terms
of [British] political debate in the 1790s over France,
and in the 1830s over reform, were set in large measure
by the lines drawn in 1776: lines that were themselves
predicated on that ancient fault line in British
politics between Republicans and &lsquo;True
Whigs&rsquo; on the one side, and Tories and Royalists
on the other" (3). Radical optimism was quickly
replaced by explanations for the apparent shortcomings
of the experimental republic: "Romanticism, frequently
viewed as an internal compensation for the failure of
the French Revolution, is quite as much a response to
the different failures of the American
Revolution&mdash;its partial failure, in some respects
to <em>be</em> a revolution, and its more lamentable
failure, from an English standpoint, to bridge the
Atlantic" (21). American Romanticism, then, is "a
delayed variation upon the literary awakening
occasioned in England by the loss of America" (21).
Significantly, Gravil&rsquo;s book is one of the first
to focus not just on demonstrating that there is
substantial transatlantic continuity in the culture of
Romanticism, but also on explaining why:</p>
<blockquote>
What made the impact of the Romantic poets especially
powerful...was that in numerous respects the
situation of idealistic Americans in
1823-1862...involved preoccupations and expectations
strangely parallel to those of England in the period
1789-1819.... In America, Blake&rsquo;s
&lsquo;mind-forged manacles&rsquo; and his
slave-trading manacles fused together for a
generation appalled by the deadlock imposed upon
social progress by a Constitution that they had been
brought up to regard as the epitome of political
wisdom if not the work of demi-gods. The dark Satanic
mills, too, were now in evidence (xiii).
</blockquote>
<p>For Gravil, the flow of ideas and cultural
formations around the Atlantic Rim follows the flow of
modernization, and this insight grounds the
spectacularly detailed historicity of his readings of
the complex web of reciprocal literary influence:</p>
<blockquote>
Just as Hawthorne and Dickens engage in a symbiotic
exchange, with Hawthorne amply repaying his debts to
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats by helping to form
the composite of fictional styles we know as
Dickensian; and just as Emerson assists Carlyle in
transforming Romantic insights into
Victorian&mdash;and then Nietzschian&mdash;forms of
Transcendence; so Whitman and Dickinson reshape and
re-equip the lyric tradition as it essentializes
itself in Tennyson, preparing the modernity of
Hopkins, Eliot, and Lawrence. (xix)
</blockquote>
<p>In this mode, Gravil narrates a fully developed
cultural history composed of multiple episodes and
vectors of ideological exchange. And while his
selection of texts may remain somewhat narrowly
canonical, he nevertheless synthesizes the insights of
the preceding two decades of revisionist scholarship
into what will long be recognized as a benchmark for
the field.<a href=
"#9">[9]</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Gravil observes rightly that a complete mapping of
what he calls the "lost continent of literary exchange
that our artificially divided academic community has
yet to recognize and explore...is work for a
generation, not for a book" (xix, xviii). This
collection of nine essays, <em>Sullen Fires Across the
Atlantic: Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism</em>, is
a contribution to that project. However, <em>Sullen
Fires</em> is bigger than the sum of its parts. These
essays were produced by a cohort of scholars for whom
the internationalism of literary culture is no longer a
hypothesis, but an axiom. That is to say, these
scholars have moved beyond demonstrating that
Romanticism <em>was</em> transatlantic, to documenting
and exploring the startling range of its
transmigrations. They have moved beyond the simple
notation of literary influence or ideological
parallelism, and are now performing a new functional
taxonomy of Romanticism from the fresh perspective of
transatlantic cultural studies.<a href=
"#10">[10]</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>As a result, these essays collectively shed light on
one of the most fundamental, and largely undiscussed,
problems in the field of transatlantic studies, namely,
why there is such pronounced parallelism between
nations, but uneven chronology, in the development of
Romantic habits of thought. It has been usual to
describe a delay of about thirty years in the flow of
ideas from England to America. But the picture is more
complicated than that. After all, republicanism
achieved its first full flowering during the American
Revolution, then crossed the Atlantic to reinvigorate
English radicalism and inspire the French Revolution.
But heroism and idealism crop up first in Germany, then
find their way to England, and much later to New
England. Similarly, the romantic novel took shape in
Scott&rsquo;s hands as a literary technology for the
authorization of English colonial dominion over
Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Then it was imported to
the New World, where first it was used by Cooper,
Sedgwick, Child and others to justify the displacement
of natives east of the Mississippi, but then was
adapted by Hawthorne, Stowe, and others to the
rhetorical needs of feminists and abolitionists. It was
finally redeployed by Dickens, Thackeray, and others,
who used it to represent the brutality of class
oppression in industrial capitalist England. In other
words, romantic genres and structures of feeling moved
fluidly back and forth across the Atlantic. And there
was no typical vector of national cultural development
that simply began at different times in different
places.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The very expectation that there should be national
and chronological uniformity of cultural development
follows from narrowly idealist and formalist modes of
analysis, from the habit of thinking about Romanticism
as an episode in the history of ideas whose coherence
inheres in a diagnostic set of discourses (idealism,
exoticism, individualism) or aesthetic patterns
(sublimity, exoticism, organicism). While it is true
some thoughts and tropes were more central than others
during the period, I would argue that they were central
because of their substantial value to a particular
class at a particular time in its development. That is,
the core of Romanticism was the ideology and rhetoric
of the British and American bourgeoisies as they first
conquered and then began to exercise political and
cultural power commensurate with their long burgeoning
economic and social power. Romanticism began with a
structure of feeling and a set of rhetorical strategies
deployed by the emergent bourgeoisie to authorize and
direct its political and economic ambitions, and it
then evolved into the ongoing post-revolutionary
project of underwriting that class&rsquo;s wholesale
restructuring of culture and society in its interests.
This was the central and most powerful current. But
substantial eddies and cross-currents complicate the
picture. Forces loyal to the residual feudal order
engaged in cultural debate, subverting, inverting, and
diverting Romanticism at the margins of the new order.
Likewise, new revolutionary forces and radical
movements&mdash;abolition, feminism, working class
organizations&mdash;immediately began to appropriate
and redeploy the bourgeoisie&rsquo;s ideas and
arguments, directing their force against their creators
in their position as a new ruling class.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Moreover, the economic and political transformation
that Romanticism both responded to and shaped occurred
in fits and starts, and this is what accounts for
uneven cultural development. In North America, where
the power of the crown was attenuated by distance, the
bourgeoisie and its allies were able to take power
directly and completely. In the British Isles, on the
other hand, a long and hard fought process of transfer
and transformation produced a system in which the
monarchy now functioned more in the interests of the
urban mercantile, commercial, and manufacturing elite
rather than the landed aristocracy. Throughout the
period, Romantic ideology was adaptively and creatively
deployed by cultural producers from all classes, but
always in ways shaped by this irregular and
unpredictable process. Romanticism, in other words, is
not a cluster of ideas or forms, but a period in the
history of cultural politics during which the most
fundamental structuring trend, the dynamic center of
gravity around which ideas and rhetorics organized
themselves, was the revolutionary emergence and
subsequent consolidation of capitalism in the British
empire.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>This materialist account is meant to establish a
principle of coherence for the subject of this volume
of essays, transatlantic Romanticism, but it does not
delimit the critical approaches to that subject taken
by our nine authors, who present a variety of close
readings, generic accounts, literary historical
approaches, and cultural materialist analyses. In other
words, rather than impose an artificial unity or
foreclose particular critical options, this argument
about periodization is designed to ground an expanded
range of interpretive possibility, enabling discovery
of the full richness of this exciting field. That range
is reflected in how the essays in <em>Sullen Fires
Across the Atlantic</em> can be organized around three
central questions: what is the nature of transatlantic
cultural influence, how does gender operate outside the
national marriage, and what is the future of
transatlantic Romantic Studies?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The first three essays demonstrate the substantial
variability in the transatlantic circulation of
literary nationalism. Sarah Ferguson-Wagstaffe sets out
to unpack what has long been no more than a "critical
intuition" by examining several "points of contact"
between William Blake and Walt Whitman, two poets who
bracket the long Romantic century. Rather than attempt
to demonstrate direct influence, she focuses on formal
parallels that mark them as definitively Romantic. Both
adopt the stance of the national prophetic poet and
both maintain a commitment to a "revisionary poetics"
that demanded a "lifelong practice of revising their
previously printed works." Each poet, as a printer, was
intimately familiar with the "material conditions of
producing and revising a long poem" through alternating
episodes of "contraction and expansion," and each
produced texts in which poetic troping of this mode of
production served as a metaphor for the revolutionary
transformation of the nation.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Sohui Lee reconstructs the literary nationalism of
John Louis O&rsquo;Sullivan&rsquo;s <em>Democratic
Review</em>, publisher of many of Nathaniel
Hawthorne&rsquo;s short stories. At a time when
American readers seemed to be in the grip of a
dangerous "Anglomania," O&rsquo;Sullivan argued that an
authentic national literature could counteract the
anti-democratic propaganda of the nation&rsquo;s
rapidly developing elite and strengthen the broader
reading public&rsquo;s dedication to Jacksonian
democratic principles. Crucially, it was in sentimental
terms that he called for such a literature. Domestic
fiction and sentimental poetry were the best means to
cultivate the moral sentiments of "human sympathy,
optimism, and brotherhood" that could "connect
America&rsquo;s disparate classes and ethnic groups in
a democratic community of feelings" that was
specifically opposed to the "specter of England."</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>This powerful combination of democratic radicalism
and literary nationalism shaped the output of many
Romantic writers to be sure, but others were quite
skeptical. Scott Harshbarger describes how Nathaniel
Hawthorne and Robert Burns reacted similarly to
Scottish and American nationalists who called for the
appropriation of oral-tradition folklore to create a
national literature. Both authors created subversive
counter-narratives which draw on "the content and
technique of folk legend...illuminating with a devilish
light the complex relationship between demons,
demonizers, and nation-making." Burns&rsquo;s "Tam
O&rsquo;Shanter" and Hawthorne&rsquo;s "Young Goodman
Brown" demonstrate how tales of the witch&rsquo;s
sabbat kept alive belief in a sinister Other, which
could be used to forge a unifying fear and hatred. Most
importantly, both texts focus satiric attention on
elite manipulation of folkloric materials to create
social cohesion through hatred and scapegoating.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The second set of three essays in <em>Sullen
Fires</em> explores the surprisingly complex
intersections of gender and nationalism in
transatlantic Romantic culture. If cultural producers
interrogated and in some cases rejected nationalist
appeals, consumers too demonstrated a good deal of
autonomy. Cree LeFavour uses Thackeray&rsquo;s
<em>Vanity Fair</em> to open a window on the chaotic
and decidedly transnational U.S. literary marketplace.
<em>Vanity Fair</em> is a parody of the sentimental
novel and it enjoyed massive popularity during the
decade following its 1848 U.S. publication. LeFavour
argues against the position, common to those who study
"women&rsquo;s nationally identified literary
production," that the "antebellum literary world" was
dominated by American women&rsquo;s sentimental novels.
Instead, she argues that "the borders between
&lsquo;genteel&rsquo; American-authored sentimental
fiction, British reprints that fit into this category,
those that didn&rsquo;t, and American originals not fit
for &lsquo;ladies&rsquo; were constantly shifting." The
way that reviewers praised the "realism" of <em>Vanity
Fair</em> and expressed wry appreciation of
transgressive characters like Becky Sharp shows that
working and middle-class readers of the period were
capable of real "sophistication and self-consciousness"
in their consumption of "an extremely diverse range of
fiction." In all, while literary nationalists attempted
to forge a unified national culture in the antebellum
U.S., both writers and their readers often tenaciously
maintained their independence and internationalism.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Jen Camden explores the cultural politics of what
she calls the forgotten heroine, a little-noticed
element of marriage plots that narrativize questions of
national identity. Ann Radcliffe&rsquo;s <em>A Sicilian
Romance</em>, Jane Austen&rsquo;s <em>Sense and
Sensibility</em>, and James Fenimore Cooper&rsquo;s
<em>The Pioneers</em> all feature paired female
protagonists. In each case, the literal or figurative
sister who demonstrates sense or reason is left out of
a novelistic conclusion that rewards the reeducation of
the sister characterized by sensibility or sentiment.
But these forgotten heroines are not merely foils or
"narrative loose ends"; they are "transgressive figures
that...allow room for alternate subjectivities."
Radcliffe&rsquo;s Emilia, for instance, operates as
part of "a pattern of narrative violation [that]
teaches us to be disappointed in the tidy ending."
Through Emilia, who in the end chooses the role of
tutor to the children of Hippolitus and Julia,
"Radcliffe authors and authorizes an alternative to
marriage." Similarly, Cooper&rsquo;s generous and pious
Louisa "exiles herself from the marriage plot"
embodying the cost of forging a unitary and
aristocratic early national identity out of the
disparate elements of frontier culture. Thus, while
these novels concern themselves mainly with policing
women&rsquo;s marriage choices and containing chaotic
sentiment within the orderly structure of the national
family, they also stage the forgotten suffering
required to consolidate a unified nation.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>If the figure of the forgotten heroine allowed women
readers visionary escape from the domestic sphere,
manly naval officers could demonstrate the power of
sympathy to bind together a well-ordered republic.
James Crane explores representations of male authority
in maritime romances by Walter Scott and James Fenimore
Cooper, showing how these two novelists engaged in a
debate over the problem of political authority.
Scott&rsquo;s <em>The Pirate</em> (1821) and
Cooper&rsquo;s <em>The Pilot</em> (1823) feature "manly
heroes who exercise authority through a personal
charisma that operates ineffably on other men." But
these figures are deployed to very different ends by
the two authors. Scott celebrates paternal government,
and conflates democracy with piracy, echoing the
period&rsquo;s conservative critique of republicanism
as a step on the way to "destructive social leveling,
violent anarchy, and the eventual dissolution of the
protective authority of the state." Cooper on the other
hand treats affective exchanges between men as sites
for the production of a stable meritocratic social
order based on sympathy: here "men among men faithfully
recognize the merit of one another because&mdash;as
good citizens&mdash;they love each other so much."</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The last three essays in <em>Sullen Fires</em>
explore the rich cultural history of literary exchange
between England and Latin America. In so doing, they
expand the field of transatlantic Romanticism to
include, as it should, the entire Atlantic Rim around
which capital, people, and ideas circulated. Joselyn
Almeida argues that "the Spanish American nexus that
connected London, Kingston, and even Dublin with Spain,
the Caribbean, South America, and Africa has been
largely overlooked." And she sets out to demonstrate
the workings of this nexus by reconstructing
Sim&oacute;n Bol&iacute;var&rsquo;s tremendously
complex and canny self-fashioning for British and South
American participants in London&rsquo;s multilingual
magazine culture. Alternative versions of a
biographical sketch of Bol&iacute;var appeared in the
January 1823 numbers of the <em>New Monthly
Magazine</em> and <em>Variedades</em>. Both articles
were vetted by Jos&eacute; Blanco White, but the second
acknowledges Bol&iacute;var&rsquo;s 1810 visit to
London, while the first suppresses this image of the
great liberator&rsquo;s political ties to imperial
Britain. Similarly, Bol&iacute;var&rsquo;s "Jamaica
Letter," written in Kingston in 1815 and published in
<em>The Jamaica Quarterly and Literary Gazette</em> in
1818, "aims to create a textual alliance between
Britain and Latin America" and "uses the language of
abolition as a critique of empire to gain sympathy for
the Latin American cause." In short, Almeida
demonstrates that transatlantic Romanticism will not
have been fully constituted as a field until we
recognize that because "intercultural exchanges cross
linguistic borders" as easily as geographic ones, we
cannot "invoke the Americas, the Caribbean, and the
Atlantic, and ignore the crucial presence of
Hispano-Americans, whom Romantic authors themselves
acknowledged."</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>If the case of Bol&iacute;var shows a canny
manipulation of audiences at the imperial center, Andre
Cardoso demonstrates how the first Brazilian novels
negotiated the demands of potential readers who "avidly
consumed European novels." Joaquim Manuel de
Macedo&rsquo;s <em>A Moreninha</em> shows that instead
of being "an automatic attempt to copy the latest
trends of European literature, the appropriation of
foreign models by the early Brazilian novel was highly
selective." <em>A Moreninha</em> narrativizes the
circulation of cultural forms in its love plot, but
"poking fun at the sentimental model is less a
criticism of this model than a refusal to take
<em>any</em> literary model too seriously.... The
process of appropriation borrows from Europe a history
for the genre of the novel, still virtually inexistent
in Brazil by the time A Moreninha was published, at the
same time that it neutralizes this history in
presenting the Brazilian novel as a child who has not
yet fully absorbed its education and is still largely
free from the dictates of any tradition." Macedo
represents the Brazilian novel, and Brazil itself, as
spaces of simultaneous awareness and freedom "on the
margins of the sea of international commerce, retaining
its childlike innocence and originality, but at the
same time engaging in an intensive interaction with
European civilization."</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Finally, Rebecca Cole Heinowitz describes how Robert
Southey&rsquo;s long poem <em>Madoc</em> narrativizes
the discourse of "good colonialism." This liberal
defense of empire was most influentially voiced by
Edmund Burke during the trial of Warren Hastings, the
notoriously corrupt Governor General of India. Burke
argued in terms "at once radically universalist and
radically chauvinistic" that the violence of the
British dominion in India, like that of the Spanish
rule of America, resulted from the failure of greedy
and short-sighted colonizers to see their fundamental
"sameness" with the colonized. Southey&rsquo;s
<em>Madoc</em>, makes a similar liberal critique of
imperialism by telling the tale of the exiled Welsh
Prince Madoc and his people, refugees from the invading
English, who forge an alliance with the Hoamen against
oppressive Aztec warlords. After overthrowing the
Aztecs, Hoamen natives and Welsh settlers amalgamate to
form a utopian new society. "By asserting that the
natives of Aztlan had been British from 1170 onwards,
Southey could legitimate modern British intervention in
the area as having a reference point historically
anterior to (and morally superior to) Spain&rsquo;s."
By banishing the violence of conquest from the poem and
staging cultural hybridization through the
self-transcending union of Malinal and Madoc, Southey
imaginatively replaces "the scene of desperate native
betrayal by the Spanish with one of enlightened native
collaboration with the British." In other words,
sameness calls for benevolent rather than mercenary
conquest. Once that conquest has been completed,
sameness helps to explain the seemingly inevitable fate
of the conquered.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>In <em>America: A Prophecy</em>, William Blake
narrates the opening moments of the transatlantic
Romantic century: "The Guardian Prince of Albion"
stares at the blood red light of "Sullen fires across
the Atlantic" where the American revolutionary army has
gathered. There, Washington reminds his compatriots
that "a heavy iron chain / Descends link by link from
Albions cliffs across the sea to bind / Brothers &amp;
sons of America..." (5). A cataclysm of revolutionary
violence follows, as it must, and Orc, the "lover of
wild rebellion" (9), emerges from the dark clouds of
war. Blake engraves him as a naked Adamic figure
sprawled atop a moldering skeleton, looking confidently
into clearing sky and singing a hymn to human
liberation:</p>
<blockquote>
Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the
field:<br />
Let him look up into the heavens &amp; laugh in the
bright air;<br />
Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in
sighing,<br />
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary
years;<br />
Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon
doors are open.<br />
And let his wife and children return from the
opressors scourge;<br />
They look behind at every step &amp; believe it is a
dream.<br />
Singing. The Sun has left his blackness, &amp; has
found a fresher morning<br />
And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear &amp;
cloudless night;<br />
For Empire is no more, and now the Lion &amp; Wolf
shall cease. (8)<br />
</blockquote>
<p>Orc&rsquo;s revolutionary impulse is the driving
force of transatlantic Romanticism. It shaped the
political aspirations of the revolutionary bourgeoisie,
aspirations voiced most influentially by figures like
Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, William Godwin, and
Mary Wollstonecraft. It also inspired the explosive
insurgency of post-revolutionary movements for
reform&mdash;abolition, women&rsquo;s rights, native
American anti-imperialism, organized labor, utopian
socialism, and more&mdash;that sought to broaden the
horizons of freedom once the bourgeoisie had
established itself firmly in power in the transatlantic
capitalist world it had created. Thus, Orc&rsquo;s
vision of liberation also structures the vibrant
literary culture of a period marked by staggeringly
inventive experimentation, with its declamatory calls
for action on behalf of the oppressed, its sensitive
delineations of human desire and subjectivity, its
sweeping surveys of complex social orders and
histories, and even its reactionary satires of
revolutionary and reformist hubris. The essays in
<em>Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic: Essays in
Transatlantic Romanticism</em> draw nine transects
through this exciting cultural field, nine lines of
inquiry that intersect at a central point: the nation,
the protagonist of both Romantic narratives of
revolution and of critical narratives of Romanticism.
Taken together, these essays demonstrate that
transatlantic literary relations during the long
Romantic century were far more intricate, far more
nuanced, than a mere agon of national cultures.</p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
<div id="notes_content">
<h4 align="center">Notes</h4>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="1"></a>1</sup> Marietta
Messmer provides a thorough and compelling genealogy of
literary historiographical nationalism in the US, and
argues that it is time for the revisionist "intra-American
cultural pluralism" of recent decades to be supplemented by
studies of "America&rsquo;s transnational or global
interliterary and intercultural relations" (50).</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="2"></a>2</sup> For a
preciously stuffy statement of the mid-century nationalist
position, see Robert Hertz&rsquo;s "English and American
Romanticism" (1965), which notes that "we characterize the
Romantics of the United States as men of affirmation,
optimism, and healthy vision of the certain glory which
lies a little beyond. By implication, the English Romantics
are brilliant but effete aristocrats rather than men of the
People or great souls of quiet meditation and discovery"
(81). See Russell Reising, Gerald Graff, and David R.
Shumway for general accounts of the nationalistic impulses
behind the disciplinary formation of American
Literature.</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="3" id="3"></a>3</sup>
Another influential summary statement of the common sense
of old historicism is Tony Tanner&rsquo;s essay, "Notes for
a Comparison between American and European Romanticism"
(1968), in one of the earliest issues of the journal of the
British Association for American Studies. Tanner is mainly
concerned to differentiate American practice from the known
quantity of the European tradition. He observes that the
Americans have an abiding sense of solitude in nature, a
low regard for history, and, more surprisingly, that they
do not have a "revolutionary social dimension," that is, an
"energizing conviction that the poet&rsquo;s imaginative
visions...could vitally influence and enhance the
conditions of life of their fellow men" (97).</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="4" id="4"></a>4</sup>
Linden Peach makes a systematic argument of this position
in his British Influence on the Birth of American
Literature (1982).</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="5" id="5"></a>5</sup>
Brantley expands his argument in Anglo-American Antiphony:
The Late Romanticism of Tennyson and Emerson (1994) and in
Experience and Faith : The Late-Romantic Imagination of
Emily Dickinson (2005).</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="6" id="6"></a>6</sup> Two
important earlier studies of reciprocity in the formation
of American and British national identity are Christopher
Mulvey&rsquo;s Anglo-American Landscapes (1983) and
Transatlantic Manners (1990), both of which use travel
narratives as their main body of evidence.</p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="7" id="7"></a>7</sup>
Another way of complicating the easy tale of American
Romanticism&rsquo;s rebellion against Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats has been to
demonstrate that Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and the rest
were consciously indebted to wholly other forebears. See,
for instance, Susan Manning&rsquo;s two excellent studies
of connections between Scottish and American literary
cultures. Also see Robin Grey&rsquo;s account of the
importance of 17th-Century English culture to the major
authors of the American Renaissance.</p>
<p><span class="indent"><sup><a name="8" id="8"></a>8</sup>
See also Giles&rsquo;s exploration of the term
"transnational" along with his rereading of Emerson and
Thoreau in the context of early national Anglophobia in
"Transnationalism and Classic American Literature." An
important complementary study of the way in which British
nationalism developed as part of the rise of imperialism is
Saree Makdisi&rsquo;s Romantic Imperialism (1998), which
rereads the central Romantic poets in the context of
developments in India, Africa, and the Arab world.</p>
<p><span class="indent"><sup><a name="9" id="9"></a>9</sup>
Several recent collections of essays have begun to explore
the field mapped most thoroughly by Gravil. Comparative
Romanticisms: Power, Gender, Subjectivity (1998), edited by
Larry H. Peer and Diane Long Hoeveler provides twelve case
studies of the true internationalism of the three
analytical categories listed in the title. These essays
make connections around the entire Atlantic Rim and beyond,
with readings of American, British, German, French,
Italian, and Russian texts. A second collection of essays
from the discipline of comparative literature, this one
focusing more narrowly on connections between the British,
French, and German Romantics, is Gregory Maertz&rsquo;s
collection, Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age
(1998). Also important for its accounts of the
internationalism of both natural history and republicanism
and their literary consequences is Revolutions and
Watersheds: Transatlantic Dialogues 1775-1815 (1999),
edited by W. M. Verhoeven and Beth Kautz. More recently,
Verhoeven has edited Revolutionary Histories: Transatlantic
Cultural Nationalism, 1775-1815 (2002), an impressive
volume centered on the Romantic keywords, "history" and
"nation." Finally, the first half of Special Relationships:
Anglo-American Affinities and Antagonisms, 1854-1936,
edited by Janet Beer and Bridget Bennett offers a valuable
selection of case studies in late Romanticism.</p>
<p><span class="indent"><sup><a name="10" id=
"10"></a>10</sup> See the two recent collections of essays
in transatlantic studies edited by Will Kaufman and Heidi
Slettedahl Macpherson for a sampling of the full range of
concerns, outside the Romantic period, addressed by this
new discipline.</p>
</div>
<div id="wc_content">
<h4 align="center">Works Cited</h4>
<p class="hang" align="left">Beer, Janet and Bridget
Bennett, eds. Special Relationships: Anglo-American
Affinities and Antagonisms, 1854-1936. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2002.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Blake, William. America: A
Prophecy. Copy E: Electronic Edition.
http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/copyinfo.xq?copyid=america.e</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of
Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1973.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Brantley, Richard.
Anglo-American Antiphony: The Late Romanticism of Tennyson
and Emerson. Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
1994.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Brantley, Richard. Coordinates
of Anglo-American Romanticism: Wesley, Edwards, Carlyle
&amp; Emerson. Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
1993.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Brantley, Richard. Experience
and Faith : The Late-Romantic Imagination of Emily
Dickinson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Chai, Leon. The Romantic
Foundations of the American Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1987.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Fender, Stephen. Sea Changes:
British Emigration and American Literature. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Giles, Paul. Transatlantic
Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of
American Literature. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2001.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Giles, Paul. "Transnationalism
and Classic American Literature." PMLA 118.1 (January
2003), 62-77.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Gilroy, Paul. The Black
Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. New York:
Verso, 1995.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Graff, Gerald. Professing
Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1987.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Gravil, Richard. Romantic
Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities, 1776-1862. New
York: St. Martin&rsquo;s Press, 2000.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Greenblatt, Stephen and Giles
Gunn, eds. Redrawing the Boundaries: the Transformation of
English and American Literary Studies. New York: MLA,
1992.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Grey, Robin. The Complicity of
Imagination: The American Renaissance, Contests of
Authority, and 17th-Century English Culture. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Hertz, Robert. "English and
American Romanticism." Personalist 46 (1965), 81-92.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Kaufman, Will and Heidi
Slettedahl Macpherson, eds. Transatlantic Studies. Lanham,
Md. : University Press of America, 2000.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Keach, William. "A
Transatlantic Romantic Century," European Romantic Review
11.1 (Winter 2000), 31-34.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl
and Will Kaufman, eds. New Perspectives in Transatlantic
Studies. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Maertz, Gregory, ed. Cultural
Interactions in the Romantic Age. Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1998.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Makdisi, Saree. Romantic
Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Manning, Susan. The
Puritan-Provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature
in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Manning, Susan. Fragments of
Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing.
New York: Palgrave, 2002.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Messmer, Marietta. "Toward a
Declaration of Interdependence: or, Interrogating the
Boundaries in Twentieth-Century Histories of North American
Literature." PMLA 118.1 (January 2003), 41-55.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Miller, Perry. "Thoreau in the
Context of International Romanticism." The New England
Quarterly 34 (1961), 147-59.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Mulvey, Christopher.
Anglo-American Landscapes : A Study of Nineteenth-Century
Anglo-American Travel Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Mulvey, Christopher.
Transatlantic Manners: Social Patterns in
Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Literature.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Peach, Linden. British
Influence on the Birth of American Literature. London:
Macmillan, 1982.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Peer, Larry H. and Diane Long
Hoeveler. Comparative Romanticisms: Power, Gender,
Subjectivity. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Reising, Russell. The Unusable
Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature. New
York: Methuen, 1986.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Shumway, David R. Creating
American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature
as a Discipline. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1994.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Spender, Stephen. Love-Hate
Relations: English and American Sensibilities. New York:
Random House, 1974.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Tanner, Tony. "Notes for a
Comparison between American and European Romanticism."
Journal of American Studies 2 (1968), 83-103.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Verhoeven, W.M., ed.
Revolutionary Histories: Transatlantic Cultural
Nationalism, 1775-1815. New York: Palgrave, 2002.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Verhoeven, W.M., and Kautz,
Beth, eds. Revolutions and Watersheds: Transatlantic
Dialogues 1775-1815. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.</p>
<p class="hang" align="left">Weisbuch, Robert. Atlantic
Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in
the Age of Emerson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986.</p>
</div></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/newman-lance">Newman, Lance</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/tags/gender" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">gender</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/623" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">nationalism</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1239" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">capitalism</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2054" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">materialism</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2166" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Transatlantic</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2167" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Latin America</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/paul-giles" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Paul Giles</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/harold-bloom" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Harold Bloom</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/henry-reed" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Henry Reed</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/henry-thoreau" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Henry Thoreau</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/alexander-chalmers" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Alexander Chalmers</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/scott-harshbarger" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Scott Harshbarger</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/ralph-waldo-emerson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/nathaniel-hawthorne" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nathaniel Hawthorne</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/paul-gilroy-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Paul Gilroy</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/leon-chai" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Leon Chai</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/james-fenimore-cooper" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">James Fenimore Cooper</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/richard-gravil-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Richard Gravil</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/stephen-fender-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Stephen Fender</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/robert-weisbuch" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Robert Weisbuch</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-city-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">City:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/london" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">London</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/germany" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Germany</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/france" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">France</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/united-states" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">United States</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/scotland" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Scotland</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/ireland" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ireland</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/wales" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Wales</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/mississippi" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mississippi</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Continent:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">America</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/continent/north-america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">North America</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/europe" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Europe</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Thu, 18 Aug 2011 05:32:25 +0000rc-admin14871 at http://www.rc.umd.eduAbstractshttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/sullenfires/abstracts.html
<div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/sullenfires/index.html">Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic: Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div id="title">
<div align="center">
<h2>Sullen Fires Across the
Atlantic:<br />
Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism</h2>
</div>
<h3 align="center">Abstracts</h3>
</div>
<div id="content">
<p align="center"><a href="#newman">Lance Newman</a> | <a href="#almeida">Joselyn Almeida</a> | <a href="#camden">Jen Camden</a> |<br/>
<a href="#cardoso">Andre Cardoso</a> | <a href="#crane">James Crane</a> | <a href="#sfw">Sarah Ferguson-Wagstaffe</a> | <a href="#harshbarger">Scott Harshbarger</a> |<br/>
<a href="#heinowitz">Cole Heinowitz</a> | <a href="#lee">Sohui Lee</a> | <a href="#lefavour">Cree LeFavour</a> |</p>
<p align="left"><b><a name="newman" id="newman"> </a>Lance Newman,</b> "Introduction: A History of Transatlantic Romanticism."</p>
<p align="left">Newman argues that Romanticism was a definitively international cultural movement, and that most literary scholarship examining the period has been deformed by rigid disciplinary boundaries that follow national borders. Nevertheless, a critical assessment of transatlantic Romanticism as national agon was established by Harold Bloom and others, beginning in the 1970s. A second wave of scholars, including Stephen Fender, Paul Gilroy, and Richard Brantley, reversed this assessment in the 1990s, emphasizing instead the absolute transnationalism of literary production during the period. Finally a third wave, including Richard Gravil and Paul Giles, has emerged that synthesizes the strengths of its predecessors, setting a new standard for empirical cultural analysis that is freed of nationalist distortions but closely attentive to the power of nationalism as one of the most fundamental structures of identity during the Romantic century. The essays in <em>Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic</em> have moved beyond the simple notation of literary influence or ideological parallelism to perform a functional taxonomy of transatlantic Romanticism. Taken together, they help explain why the movement developed at different times and rates in different places around the Atlantic. Romanticism was a complex and multivalent response to, and articulation of, the combined and uneven rise of capitalist social relations. The first two sets of essays focus on literary nationalism and gender and nationalism. The third explores the rich cultural history of literary exchange between England and Latin America, pointing out new directions for the field.</p>
<p align="left"><a href="/praxis/sullenfires/intro/intro.html">[go to introduction]</a></p>
<p align="left"><b><a name="almeida" id="almeida"> </a>Joselyn Almeida,</b> "London-Kingston-Caracas: The Transatlantic Self-Fashioning of Sim&#243;n Bol&#237;var."</p>
<p align="left">Joselyn Almeida argues that "the Spanish American nexus that connected London, Kingston, and even Dublin with Spain, the Caribbean, South America, and Africa has been largely overlooked." She sets out to demonstrate the workings of this nexus by reconstructing Sim&#243;n Bol&#237;var's tremendously complex and canny self-fashioning for British and South American participants in London's multilingual magazine culture. Alternative versions of a biographical sketch of Bol&#237;var appeared in the January 1823 numbers of the New Monthly Magazine and Variedades. Both articles were vetted by Jos&#233; Blanco White, but the second acknowledges Bol&#237;var's 1810 visit to London, while the first suppresses this image of the great liberator's political ties to imperial Britain. Similarly, Bol&#237;var's "Jamaica Letter," written in Kingston in 1815 and published in <em>The Jamaica Quarterly</em> and <em>Literary Gazette</em> in 1818, "aims to create a textual alliance between Britain and Latin America" and "uses the language of abolition as a critique of empire to gain sympathy for the Latin American cause." In short, Almeida demonstrates that transatlantic Romanticism will not have been fully constituted as a field until we recognize that because "intercultural exchanges cross linguistic borders" as easily as geographic ones, we cannot "invoke the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic, and ignore the crucial presence of Hispano-Americans, whom Romantic authors themselves acknowledged."</p>
<p align="left"><a href="/praxis/sullenfires/almeida/almeida_essay.html">[go to essay]</a></p>
<p align="left"><b><a name="camden" id="camden"> </a>Jen Camden,</b> "'Do you forget Louisa?': Forotten Heroines and the Marriage Plot in Radcliffe, Austen, and Cooper."</p>
<p align="left">In this essay, Jen Camden locates the erasure and then the return of secondary heroines, such as Louisa Grant in James Fenimore Cooper's <em>The Pioneers</em>, as part of a larger narrative pattern of forgetting in the nineteenth-century novel. Specifically, she examines Ann Radcliffe's <em>A Sicilian Romance</em> (1790), Jane Austen's <em>Sense and Sensibility</em> (1811), and <em>The Pioneers</em> to argue that each novel &#8220;forgets&#8221; a heroine, only to have her return at the end in a puzzling and uncanny &#8220;return of the repressed.&#8221; Rather than understanding this return in psychoanalytic terms, however, she examines these heroines in terms of competing ideals of national identity and femininity. Specifically, she shows that the primary heroines in these novels represent a socially-visible &#8220;sensibility&#8221; that represses the more invisible &#8220;sense&#8221; represented by the secondary heroines. In turn, these novels evoke readers' sensibilities, either to enforce or, in the case of Austen, to question the role of sensibility in shaping the national identities of England and America through literary heroines. In this way, she demonstrates that the transatlantic transmission of the figure of the forgotten heroine is illustrative of the cultural work performed by the novel as a genre in both England and America.</p>
<p align="left"><a href="/praxis/sullenfires/camden/camden_essay.html">[go to essay]</a></p>
<p align="left"><b><a name="cardoso" id="cardoso"> </a>Andre Cardoso,</b> "Children Playing by the Sea: The Dynamics of Appropriation in the Brazilian Romantic Novel."</p>
<p align="left">Although the nineteenth-century romantic novel in Brazil is intensely concerned with the creation of a national identity, this has little to do with the reproduction of a local reality. The early Brazilian novel seems rather to build a national identity through its relationship with novelistic models imported from Europe. This appropriation, however, is highly selective and avoids the dogmatic adoption of any given model: it is rather based on the freeplay among different models in a kind of game in which none of them is supposed to be taken seriously. In this game, the Brazilian nation is seen&#8212;or rather imagined&#8212;as an in-between place characterized by indefinition. At the same time, the analysis of two primordial Brazilian novels, Joaquim Manuel de Macedo's <em>A Moreninha</em> and Jos&#233; de Alencar's <em>Luc&#237;ola</em>, shows that this in-between space is connected to the indefinition of a paradisiacal place of origin and to the innocence of childhood, which appear as two essential values in the way the Brazilian nation is imagined in its formative stages by its writers.</p>
<p align="left"><a href="/praxis/sullenfires/cardoso/cardoso.html">[go to essay]</a></p>
<p align="left"><b><a name="crane" id="crane"> </a>James Crane,</b> "Love and Merit in Maritime Historical Novels."</p>
<p align="left">In British and American maritime novels, commanding seafaring figures illustrate the ways that Romantic-era writers understood the links among manliness, feeling, and political organization. Friendship, in particular, provides an effective metaphor for both the organizing power of heroic individuals and the patriotic bonds that unify citizens. This essay compares the relationships among sailors in Walter Scott's novel <em>The Pirate</em> (1821) to the instances of intimate friendship among heroes in <em>The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea</em> (1823) by James Fenimore Cooper. In Scott's romance, piracy and democracy isolate worthy men from the histories and national traditions that make individual enterprise meaningful. Cooper responds to this conflation of democracy with piracy by imagining that, in the Revolutionary-era US Navy, the natural feelings of men in groups produce a smoothly-functioning meritocracy. Through scenarios that dramatize how republican men among men will faithfully recognize the merit of one another because&#8212;as good citizens&#8212;they love each other so much, in <em>The Pilot</em> Cooper stages the improving effects of US social relations upon institutions inherited from Britain. Both writers stress the relationship between manliness and meritocracy, but only Cooper trusts that the innate appeal of American white manhood will ensure the sustainability and justice of democratic social relations.</p>
<p align="left"><a href="/praxis/sullenfires/crane/crane_essay.html">[go to essay]</a></p>
<p align="left"><b><a name="sfw" id="sfw"> </a>Sarah Ferguson-Wagstaffe,</b> "Points of Contact: Blake and Whitman."</p>
<p align="left">This essay seeks to reopen a transatlantic dialogue between Blake and Whitman, and illuminate a material point of contact (Whitman's tomb)through a close reading of these poets' rhetorical points of contact. The author focuses on Blake's engraving, "Death's Door," which served as a model for Whitman's tomb, Whitman's responses to Blake in his letters and notes, their shared status as prophetic poets, and their poetics of revision.</p>
<p align="left"><a href="/praxis/sullenfires/sfw/sfw_essay.html">[go to essay]</a></p>
<p align="left"><b><a name="harshbarger" id="harshbarger"> </a>Scott Harshbarger,</b> "National Demons: Burns, Hawthorne, and the Folk in the Forest."</p>
<p align="left">A comparison of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" and Robert Burns's "Tam O'Shanter" sheds light on the critical strategies the authors developed in adapting folk materials in a milieu awash with literary nationalism. Whereas literary nationalism is often intended to celebrate the native glory of an exceptional people, these works, drawing on the content and technique of folk legend, reveal the flipside of that project, illuminating the complex relationship between demons, demonizers, and cultural nation-making. Whereas Burns seems content to play with the dichotomies upon which the Scottish nation might be constructed&#8212;his hero comically impervious to any attempt to define a detestable other&#8212;Hawthorne seems more worried by a project that rests on such a strategy. The writers' attempt to forge national worship through folk legend and belief is considerably complicated, and subversively inspired, by the strange and mournful tales of the folk themselves.</p>
<p align="left"><a href="/praxis/sullenfires/harshbarger/harshbarger_essay.html">[go to essay]</a></p>
<p align="left"><b><a name="heinowitz" id="heinowitz"> </a>Rebecca Cole Heinowitz,</b> "The Allure of the Same: Rober Southey's Welsh Indians and the Rhetoric of Good Colonialism."</p>
<p align="left">While scholars of the British nineteenth century are already familiar with the rhetoric of otherness that characterized the writing of the Victorian empire in India and Africa, we are less accustomed to analyzing the rhetoric of sameness that characterized Romantic-era Britain's imperial interest in Spanish America. To begin to address the figure of cross-cultural similitude in Romantic British writing, this essay focuses on Robert Southey's 1805 poem Madoc, a Welsh-Mexican epic set in the twelfth century. The investigation starts with Edmund Burke's charges against Warren Hastings, the Governor General of Bengal, and uses Burke's plea for benevolent colonialism in India to understand the political context behind Madoc's celebration of "good" imperialism in Spanish America. While Southey's notion of benevolent imperialism worked to allay anxieties aroused by Britain's increasingly aggressive presence in Spanish America, however, the vision of natural moral rectitude it conjured up was fraught with contradictions. If the tacit agenda behind Madoc was to imagine how the ancient Britons could have conquered and colonized America more humanely than the Spanish, then the process of imagining this reality revealed uncomfortable similarities between sixteenth-century Spain and Romantic-era England. Even while the lessons of the Hastings trial weighed heavily on the British conscience, Britain was forwarding a policy of indirect rule and outright conquest in Spanish America. Madoc is thus as much the document of Southey's anxious struggle to exalt imperial protectionism as a unifier of conqueror and conquered as it is a tale of how Prince Madoc conquered Mexico, freed the native Hoamen from their Aztec tyrants, and founded a colony of "Welsh Indians." Southey's portrayal of "good" colonialism and Welsh-Mexican harmony ultimately exceeds its own rhetoric, revealing terrible violence on both sides, and requiring the annihilation of Prince Madoc's American
progeny in order to purge Britain of its imperial guilt.</p>
<p align="left"><a href="/praxis/sullenfires/heinowitz/heinowitz.html">[go to essay]</a></p>
<p align="left"><b><a name="lee" id="lee"> </a>Sohui Lee,</b> "'An Anti-Democratic Habit of Feeling':The Rhetoric of Toryism in O'Sullivan's <em>Democratic Review</em> 1837-1846."</p>
<p align="left">America's well-known quest for national literature began, as Benjamin Spencer relates, with the new republic's search for a surrogate British identity, making the great problem of American literature a problem of ontology&#8212;that is, a problem of being, as Poe observes, &#8220;a literary colony of Great Britain&#8221; (Poe 1044). For some nineteenth-century American thinkers, the unavoidable consequence of their colonial relationship with Britain was derivative literature: it was a question whether American literature exists or could ever be established. In this essay I'd like to offer another way of thinking about antebellum literary nationalism and America's obsession with literary independence by examining nationalism in John Louis O'Sullivan's <em>Democratic Review</em>, one of the most prestigious and influential magazines of the period. By shifting the issue of nationalism from writers and anxieties of aesthetic independence to anxieties about readers and ideological dependency, I hope to show how the <em>Democratic Review</em> introduced a particular brand of democratic personality and aesthetics which was reinforced by the literature printed in its pages. Antebellum nationalism, as it surfaced in Jacksonian rhetoric of the 1830s and early 1840s, acknowledged the aesthetic problem of originality and dependency, but it also turned to a separate, though related, critical concern: the popularity of British books and its effect on American readers. A material study of creative works in the <em>Democratic Review</em> alongside the writings of its editor O'Sullivan reveal a nationalist strategy that focused on combating British literary power over Americans. For O'Sullivan, national literature doubly counteracted British influence: by visualizing a morally distinct American identity determined by affective ties amongst its people and by fashioning a British Tory identity dramatically opposed to the American Democrat's. This essay explores
O'Sullivan's vital contribution to Jacksonian nationalism through the assembly of authors like Hawthorne and a politicized literary charge that imagined Britain as the moral and sympathetic antithesis to the United States.</p>
<p align="left"><a href="/praxis/sullenfires/lee/lee_essay.html">[go to essay]</a></p>
<p align="left"><b><a name="lefavour" id="lefavour"> </a>Cree LeFavour,</b> "<em>Vanity Fair</em> and the Logic of Anglo-American Sentimentality."</p>
<p align="left"><em>Vanity Fair's</em> strong presence in the American market invites the dissolution of the monochromatic sentimentality that critics still too often expect of American women's novels at mid-century. The book's popularity provides an opportunity to examine what crtics and, presumably readers, valued about novels and why. LeFavour argues that Becky Sharp's "naturalness," and her explicit rejection of books and female self-improvement invite a reconconsideration of the naivite and simplicity critics have often assumed in their discussions of American domestic fiction. At the same time, debates over Becky's unconventional femininity draws attention to the contentious debates over the moral status of novels themselves and the kind of cultural work they performed.</p>
<p align="left"><a href="/praxis/sullenfires/lefavour/lefavour_essay.html">[go to essay]</a></p>
</div></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2158" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">transatlantic Romanticism</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/paul-giles" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Paul Giles</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/richard-brantley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Richard Brantley</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/paul-gilroy-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Paul Gilroy</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/harold-bloom" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Harold Bloom</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/lance-newman" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Lance Newman</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/james-fenimore-cooper" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">James Fenimore Cooper</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/richard-gravil-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Richard Gravil</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jane-austen" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jane Austen</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/stephen-fender-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Stephen Fender</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/joselyn-almeida" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Joselyn Almeida</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/louisa-grant" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Louisa Grant</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-city-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">City:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/kingston" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Kingston</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/city/dublin" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Dublin</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/caracas" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Caracas</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/city/london" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">London</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/united-states" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">United States</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/brazil" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Brazil</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/spain" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Spain</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/latin-america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Latin America</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-region-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Region:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/region/caribbean" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Caribbean</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Continent:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">America</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/continent/europe" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Europe</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/south-america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">South America</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/continent/americas" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Americas</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/africa" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Africa</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/continent/latin-america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Latin America</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Thu, 18 Aug 2011 05:17:49 +0000rc-admin14851 at http://www.rc.umd.edu